Roger, I understand your comments, and I think you make a decent point. We have operated for a long time with this "resolve it on the fly" style. Letting things be resolved naturally has its strengths.
The point of doing this now is to keep much of that natural style the group has, but to provide some rules or policies to let people know what kind of things we cannot accept because they jeopardize the group. By "jeopardize the group", I mean not necessarily jeopardize all the members of the group, but even one individual or the group entity itself where the holders of the domain could be sued by copyright holders, etc.) Why do we need these policies? We have had members who have insulted other members based on gender, religious ideas or other beliefs. We have had members who have posted warez to the group or tried to use the IRC channel to share warez. We have had people show up at meetings and do things which range from uncool to illegal. What usually happens is that I have to have a talk to that person and explain that they cannot use any socallinux.org resource for exchanging illegal copies of software (or whatever.) The number one response to my discussion on this point is: "I didn't know it wasn't allowed here" - I believe we need to have the charter and the usage policies be publicly stated for this reason. When these policies are publicly stated and well known, every member can help resolve these issues - rather than that task being only up to me to handle. Maybe you can add some thoughts as to how to protect the group from someone joining or showing up and doing things which jeopardize the group and their defense being: "I didn't know" or: "It doesn't say anywhere not to do this..." Further comments in-line below. Roger E. Rustad, Jr. wrote: > I just gave this constitution a quick read and am personally not too > keen on it. Make a document like this, and I suspect you will soon have > people quibbling over what goes in it and how it is to be interpreted, I don't think there will be a lot of quibbling over some basic ground-rules - but if there were, it would seem to be better than having constant ongoing quibbling over how to deal with issues that need to be declared upfront. > rather than agreeing on the spirit of what it was intended to do (ensure > open communication on GNU/Linux issues, in our case). This is what I have done - a basic agreement to ensure we have open communication - plus added protection against illegal activities which could jeopardize the groups existence in the future. > My solution here is simple: > > Articulate the group's goal / focus and simply ask for people's "buy in" > to it. Just did that today. People will be attracted to that positive goal and will naturally > start ignoring those who fall shy of that goal. Agreed. That is why we're doing this. > (Personally, I'm cool with leaving open the door for "attacks, even in > jest". I spent 4 months recovering a hosed hard drive for a friend with > F/OSS tools, and I failed at several attempts. Others here savagely > made fun of me and how pointless my attempts were. To a large degree, > Dino et al were right!) While you are thick-skinned, there are others who at times feel as if the tenor of the discussion is beyond a polite or professional level, and I have heard from them. There is also the issue of setting a good example for people that are not familiar with us. If someone doesn't know us, and they join the list or stumble across it somehow, they are left with the impression that the mailing list is a free-for-all or a playground for a select few, which it is not. Well, this particular "attacks on others" points is an area that is definitely of the "resolve it naturally over time" style. I'm not against removing the "even in jest" part. If others think that goes too far, we could take it out. We definitely have that experience in the IRC channel. It is something that might still have to be moderated on the mailing list. _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list [email protected] http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
