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[ga] Final draft of proposed mailing list rules
Enclosed please find my proposal for mailing list rules for the GA list,
and the suggested timeline for the further work on this proposal.
It is now time for an opinion poll on the proposed ruleset. By the end of
the week, we hope that we can have a decision.
Harald T. Alvestrand
COVER LETTER
A debate has been going on for some time on the list ga@dnso.org about appropriate
rules of conduct for that list.
This (version 0.2) is the proposal for mailing list rules that we ask the GA to indicate its opinion on.
The next steps of process are:
- Monday, Jan 17: This message and the proposal is posted to the GA list.
It is also posted to the DNSO website, and to the announce list, as
appropriate.
- Joop Ternstra will mail instructions on how to to
participate in the opinion poll, conducted using his polling booth at
http://www.democracy.org.nz/vote1/
- The poll runs until Friday, Jan 21, 12:00 GMT. At or soon after that time,
the GA Chair will evaluate the result, and either recommend that the rules
be adopted or that they not be adopted.
- If their adoption is recommended, he will also recommend one or more
sergeants-at-arms, and/or ask for volunteers for this function.
His recommendation will be announced to the list.
- If, after listening to the response to the recommendation, his recommendation
remains the same on Monday, Jan 24, the proposal is put into force.
If this process goes well, this should conclude the work (for now) of adoption of rules for the ga@dnso.org list.
RULES OF ORDER FOR THE MAILING LISTS OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE DNSO
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Version 0.2 - basis of GA opinion poll
The General Assembly (GA) is defined as follows:
[quote from the DNSO documents at http://www.dnso.org/]
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
(a) The GA shall be an open forum for participation in the work of the DNSO, and open to all who are willing to contribute effort to the work of the DNSO. The participants in the GA should be individuals who have a knowledge of and an interest in issues pertaining to the areas for which the DNSO has primary responsibility, and who are willing to contribute time, effort and expertise to the work of the DNSO, including work item proposal and development, discussion of work items, draft document preparation, and participation in research and drafting committees and working groups.
(b) The GA shall meet at least once a year, if possible in conjunction with regularly scheduled meetings of the Board. To the maximum extent practicable, all meetings should be available for online attendance as well as physical attendance.
(c) The costs of GA meetings shall be the responsibility of the DNSO, which may levy an equitable, cost-based fee on GA attendees to recoup those costs. There shall be no other fees required to participate in the GA.
(d) The GA shall nominate, pursuant to procedures adopted by the NC and approved by the Board, persons to serve on the Board in those seats reserved for the DNSO.
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For purposes of its internal operation, the General Assembly maintains mailing lists.
These are as follows:
- announce@dnso.org for announcements from the DNSO
- ga@dnso.org for discussion among GA members on GA business
Both lists are open for subscription by any E-mail address.
Both lists are archived.
The membership of the lists is not made public.
The announce list is available for official pronouncements only.
The ga list is open for mail from any subscribed members, subject to constraints given below.
The purpose of the GA list is to allow discussion between GA members on GA matters. It is not itself a decision-making body.
Note: Neither list claims to be an authoritiative listing of the members of the GA, but when a mail is sent to the announce list, it is considered to be published to the GA membership.
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RIGHTS TO POST
--------------
The following entities have the right to post to the GA mailing list:
- GA members who are members of the GA mailing list, posting using the email
address by which they are known to the GA list, who have posting rights in good standing
- The staff of the DNSO list management (for technical announcements)
The following rules apply to content of messages on the GA list:
- The messages must be relevant to the business of the GA
- The messages must observe a minimum of decorum, including:
- Not indulging in personal attacks, insults or slander
- Not using offensive language
- If the GA Chair or Sergeant-at-arms asks for a limit to the nuber of posts
per person per day, this must be respected
- The size of messages should be kept reasonable (there should be a VERY good
reason to send a message of more than 10 Kbytes).
Certain persons appointed by the GA Chair (the Sergeants-At-Arms) have the task of monitoring the list for posts that violate these rules.
These are selected by the GA Chair for a given period of time, but may be removed from the role by the GA Chair or at their own request at any time.
Normally the appointment would be for 1 year.
A Sergeant-At-Arms may impose 2 sanctions against offenders:
- Monitoring of posts. This will cause delay of postings from the affected individual until a list moderator approves them as being within the content rules, or rejects them
- Suspension of posting rights. This will cause mail from that person not to be sent to the GA list.
Both sanctions are imposed for a limited period of time (typically 2 weeks), and are announced on the mailing list. Repeat offenders may get correspondingly longer sentences (for instance 4 weeks for a second offense, 8 weeks for a third).
The period is decided by the sergeant-at-arms.
Note that due to technical issues, monitoring one member's postings may cause monitoring to be applied to other members' posts. This is to be avoided as far as possible.
The action of the sergeant-at-arms may be appealed to the GA Chair.
VERIFICATION OF MEMBERSHIP
--------------------------
The rules above refer to members posting using the email address (singular) by which
they are known.
This assumes that an email address belongs to a person, and that it can be verified that two email addresses belong to different persons.
Given the properties of the E-mail environment, this is not trivial. Hence, the following method is applied:
- In the normal case, any email address capable of subscribing to the list is
assumed to belong to an unique person unless the list management is otherwise notified.
The special list "ga-monitor@dnso.org" is provided for those email addresses that
are not persons, but only wish to get a copy of GA messages.
- If the identity behind some email address set is challenged, the Sergeant-At-Arms may ask the challenged party for proof of identity. The Sergeant-at-arms has discretion in deciding whether to take action upon a challenge, and to decide what proof of identity is acceptable in each particular case.
A notarized copy of a civil identification (such as a driver's license or passport) is always acceptable.
The claimed identity belonging to the email address is recorded by the Sergeant-at-arms, and the finding is announced to the list. The challenged party may ask the Sergeant-at-arms not to publish his civil identity; this shall be respected.
In the case where it is not possible to prove distinct identities for 2 mail addresses, the posting right of the email address whose distinct identity could not be proven is permanently suspended.
ACCESS TO UNFILTERED LIST
-------------------------
There exists an open list that can be subscribed to: ga-unfiltered@dnso.org.
This will get *all* mail sent to ga@dnso.org, no restrictions (except for possibly technical restrictions like message size or size of header).
It will be archived by the DNSO.
Public access to the archive will be granted as much as possible; there may be legal reasons (e.g. rules against republication of slander) that require closing some parts of the archive.
The existence of this list will make it possible to have independent verification of what the filtering function does.
TECHNICAL MATTERS
-----------------
Addresses are removed from the mailing list if:
- delivery of mail to that address is impossible over a period of at least 7 days
- delivery of mail causes disruptive automatic behaviour (such as bounce messages
sent to the mailing list, causing loops)
These matters are handled by the list maintainers, and no notification is done.
A list of addresses removed for technical reasons can be viewed at the DNSO website.
In the case of illegitimate actions that may harm the function of the list, such as denial of service attacks, the list maintainers are authorized to take appropriate action. Appropriate notification of such action will be given to the list as soon as it is reasonable.
--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no