On top of this, we acknowledge that Web and communication technologies are inherently political and can be used to cause harm, against the intent of the original creators. We recognise power imbalances already endemic in the tech industry, and in Social Web systems in mainstream use. With that in mind, we do not welcome participation (however polite) by contributors to projects which are designed or primarily used for:
oppression, or encouraging oppression, of vulnerable people or minority groups.
planning, encouragement of or inciting violence against vulnerable people.
promoting fascism, nazism or other authoritarian systems and practices.
perpetuating, promoting, or enacting systematic injustices, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia.
We are vigilant for the use of imagery, language and dogwhistles related to such behaviours. We reserve the right to exclude projects which tolerate such behaviours within their communities, or have not made a good faith effort to discourage such behaviours.
The intent of this policy is not to exclude wholesale any developers involved with projects or communities who unknowingly interact with bad actors, or who are struggling to or unable to eliminate behavior that goes against this policy in their wider communities. Similarly, we do not expect developers of open source projects to be responsible for every installation or fork of their codebase and will of course take the realities of this into account when making any moderation decisions.
SocialCG chairs and forum administrators may use their discretion to remove posts or suspend user accounts. SocialCG chairs may similarly refuse access to or remove individuals from virtual meetings.
Active stage
The policy is now active, from 2021-02-18T23:00:00Z.
Policy Details
Details
It does concern you!
Following intense discussion during the proposal phase@rhiaro updated the Policy to make it clear we are not trying to place unreasonable burdens on developers or other participants in open source communities who can’t be held responsible for actions of wider communities or other users of their projects.
The policy above is destined to anyone willing to become a member of the SocialHub community, and applied here to @trust_level_1 – a group you’re automatically part of when you spend a few minutes reading around…
Here’s how it plays…
Once you’re in this group, you will receive a weekly reminder until you accept or refuse the policy.
You can simply click the “I agree to abide by these rules” button to accept the policy. If you want to refuse the policy, you first have to click the same button, and then the “I disagree and will go elsewhere” button.
Accounts with no policy agreement or with disagreement will be suspended indefinitely.
Accounts who do not abide by these rules will be removed as well.
I agree with almost all of this, but this part is very unclear and vague: “promoting […] authoritarian systems and practices”. What is your definition of “authoritarian” here? The interpretation might be very different depending on who you ask, even including any state government according to some anarchists.
Edit: I also found this sentence very complicated, and had to read the previous discussion to understand what it means. I believe it could be rewritten in a clearer way, by splitting it into two or more sentences. “With that in mind, we do not welcome participation (however polite) by contributors to projects which are designed or primarily used for…”
Edit: I agreed to the statement because it keeps bugging me and I dont plan to talk about politics on here anyway. Still I would be curious about a reply to my doubts.
This wording is certainly redundant, but it’s very specific and explicit. Many people won’t read the same whether the word is said or not. Best proof is that masculine violence against women or racism are still rampant. You have to state things to make them visible. (BTW, the wording is not mine.)
I suppose that the SWIG rules follow the W3C Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct which is mentioned as the basis and common ground for the policy set forth here. As you can read, the people who drafted the SocialHub Community Values Policy thought these were not enough. So I’m wondering, why do you think the W3C CEPC is enough? And why do you think the rules on top of it are unnecessary or otherwise undesirable? When people oppose something, I like them to be clear about why they do it, as it clarifies for others what kind of philosophy or power relations are underlying such decisions.
What do you mean @indieterminacy? We never enforced the policy because given the number of people who do not care at all accepting it, it would collapse the community. But if something happens, the @well-being.team is ready to enforce it, I hope.
It’s interesting to see the balance of fail and success in this openweb project/community in the small picture we secede in the big picture we fail, a recurring #geekproblem. How to care about this is something we don’t think about much. Maybe this should be a part of our SocialHub Community Values, how can we embedded something like this, is it even possible.
We used to call this “netiquette” for the #fluffy side, and it existed in meany “spiky” tech projects but was never codified, maybe this might be a good problem to try and solve?
@hamishcampbell there will always be some (small/big) group of people who will say sth along the lines of: “this is stupid/wrong/tyrany/whatever” just because someone else has done something that (should be serving) common goal.
