User Guidelines and or Rules #1425
Comments
|
Some suggestions:
|
|
A good place to start: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service |
|
@mvdkleijn Do the companies tipping on Gittip with their name/brand and URL to their website match the "No commercial advertisements in disguise"? |
|
+1 from @johnvpetersen on Twitter (wrt panhandling). |
|
this is the user https://www.gittip.com/Blear/ |
|
Gittip is not hosting that image, GitHub is, so I suggest using GitHub's "Report Abuse" button. The issue on the Gittip side is showing the avatar in the "New Participants" section of the homepage, which I assume is where @tkwidmer discovered it. |
|
Why did I get this? Sent from my iPhone
|
|
@johnvpetersen You are on this ticket because of this comment on Twitter three months ago: https://twitter.com/johnvpetersen/status/433225386160164865 At the time I added a +1 for you here. Feel free to unsubscribe using the button in the sidebar in the GitHub UI:
|
|
OK.. Thanks for the context. On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 7:36 AM, Chad Whitacre [email protected]:
|
|
So is Gittip willing to tolerate a "Nazi" community on Gittip? Why or why not? IRC |
|
+1 for community guidelines of some sort. A Nazi avatar is unbelievably offensive at best, IMHO. |
|
I'm not willing to tolerate a Nazi community on gittip. If it's not gone in 24 hours, I'm leaving. IMO, the whole point of gittip to me has been is that it's been about people doing good, inspirational work. If they are allowed to stay, then gittip is meaningless. Might as well just put a PayPal button on everything I do and ask for donations. |
|
Rather than asking about a "Nazi" community maybe the question should be what kind of community in general would not be allowed and for what reason. For example you may not allow communities that have as their core belief the idea that slavery is justified. You could say you do not accept such a community because we do not believe that any person can own another person and we do not want to promote or affiliate with such a group. Do you not shop at a grocery store if you know the owner / manager believes differently than you on some key issue (abortion, taxes, guns, etc...)? What is the purpose of a community in the context of gittip? |
|
I'd quit Gittip if it became a place for white suprematists to tip each other for brutal behavior. Don't want to be part of anything like this: http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2014/04/17/splc-report-nearly-100-murdered-by-stormfront-users/ |
|
@pydanny I'm not sure we're going to come to a resolution within your 24 hour time frame. Drafting and editing an entire User Guidelines document takes some time, especially when all of your employees work on their own time. |
|
Then I'll suspend my account immediately and wait. If you come to what I think is the correct decision, then I'll reactivate. If not, I'm done with gittip. |
@pydanny: there is no such community. There's only an inactive user with a controversial avatar:
|
For the record, we don't have a Nazi community yet. We have one user with Nazi symbolism in their avatar. |
|
I would say that Gittip should not support a Nazi community, or any hate group. A good place to start when differentiating "hate groups" from otherwise disagreeable communities might be the FBI's definition of hate groups:
|
|
@pcperini Does having a Nazi Party symbol as your avatar fall under your "hate group" clause? |
|
This is gosh darn tricky. I am trying to bring myself to @mention the user in question. |
|
Do not forget that in some jurisdictions the financial support of nazi related organizations could be illegal. |
|
@ironfroggy Yes. I found this about Twitter complying with German law on the matter. Apparently Twitter has fine-grained blocking abilities and scoped their censorship in this case to Germany only. |
|
Technically speaking, you'd simply be against some countries laws I think, because you'd provide a medium for ethnic/racial hatred. It's against the law in France, also in UK I think |
|
I guess gittip doesn't have a suspend feature. Or a 'flag' feature. 😒 |
|
@pydanny Nope. You're watching the development of such features as we speak. :-) |
|
@ChimeraCoder on Twitter:
We should remember that any community that we exclude from Gittip is still free to use our software to run their own funding platform. |
|
I think there's a good distinction between gittip the service and gittip the software. As a service, I think there's a lot more leeway to decide who you welcome and who you think is toxic to the community. I think that any group that advocates that there is a set of humanity strictly worse than another set of humanity is incompatible with the group of people that are currently invested in the success of gittip as a piece of OSS and as a service. |
|
What are some parallels to inform our conversation here? |
|
Can we just invoke/enforce Wheaton's Law and be done with it? |
|
I have lots of opinions here, I'm also about to lose internet connectivity. However I'm going to suggest starting with the citizen code of conduct, and suggest both the django and rust codes of conduct as good starting places. These are easy to understand, enforce Wheaton's Law, and have already been tested by projects in the past. I've also unashamedly taken these from the advice from the Ada Initiative on designing codes of conduct. Gittip is proving itself to be an awesome platform for diversity and diversity advocates, and that's something I firmly wish to encourage. |
On second thought, I take that back. This is an important topic and I shouldn't try to get out of dealing with it just because I want to say things that I think are going to be unpopular. First, I'd like to distinguish between:
The former applies to content published on a Gittip profile, and is the original scope of this ticket. The latter applies to conversations on Gittip repos, in Gittip chat channels, at Gittip events, etc. The examples of codes of conduct for open-source conferences and projects apply more to the latter. The examples of user guidelines for other sites like Kickstarter, etc. apply to the former. We need both. Let's keep this ticket for user guidelines. I've reticketed community guidelines as gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#66. |
|
@whit537 now that we've made that distinction clear so these guidelines refer to just to what you can put in your profile statement. I can add a few more from http://www.patreon.com/legal
As for the action we would perform if you violate these terms: "Gittip reserves the right, without notice and in its sole discretion, to terminate your license to use the Site and/or to block or prevent your future.access to, and use of, the Site" Do we need to say something about any funds that the user has accumulated? BTW @ChimeraCoder since Gittip LLC is a Philadelphia registered company and is "governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Commonwealth Philadelphia" The words; local, international, defamation etc. have a pretty unambiguous but general meaning within this context. Remember this is just about what you can post in your profile statement |
|
@chrisdev Thanks, I think I lost track of the context that this was for the profile statement, as opposed to general use of the site. With that scope, it makes much more sense. (I agree that the meaning is (legally) clear - but without including that piece of context in the guidelines, it may not be clear to international users if they don't already know that. And for what it's worth, I didn't object to the actual content on that point - I just wanted to make sure our understanding of the clarity/transparency of the guidelines is informed by our knowledge of the international userbase.) |
|
No worries @ChimeraCoder I understand your point. I think these should go somewhere in here https://www.gittip.com/about/terms/ which is full of legal boiler plate stuff. I've put all of them together here so we can add to or delete the weirder ones Your gittip user profile that allows you to make a statement about your goals and objectives for using the service. Without limitation, users may not use this profile to
|
Well, I think we do want to think in terms of "general use of the site" here. The distinction I was making above was between users of Gittip on the one hand, and people participating in Gittip as an open company/open-source project on the other. It just so happens that the profile page is the only place a user can publish content on Gittip.com right now, but whatever we come up with here should apply to any new publishing channels we implement on Gittip.com (e.g., #967). |
|
Understood @whit537 then we replace Your gittip user profile that allows you to make a statement about your goals and objectives for using the service. Without limitation, users may not use this profile to With Gittip may contain communication facilities such as (but not limited to) user profiles, chat areas, news groups, forums, communities and/or other message facilities that allow Users to communicate with other Users and also with the wider community. You should only use these facilities to communicate in a manner that is appropriate to the forum. Without limitation, users may not use these communication facilities to: |
|
I'm a late arrival here, and may not have spotted this except @whit537 nicely mistagged @pjz as @pjf, which I'm very grateful for. I'm giving a big +1 on the views of @tkwidmer and @pydanny, which I strongly agree with. And a huge thank you and +1 to @chrisdev, I really do like how the terms are looking right now. Thank you all so much. I'm not big on laws; I think doing what is right strongly trumps doing what is lawful. I understand we might need a "don't break any laws" term to cover our own asses, but I really hope we don't strongly enforce that one. I'm thinking exactly of @tkwidmer's points here; sex work is illegal in many parts of the world, but I believe those laws are extremely harmful and in need of change. To close the accounts of sex workers would be to take the voices of an already suppressed minority and suppress them even more. Likewise I hope we don't close the accounts of people just because they're gay (practically illegal in Russia), or have mullets (illegal in Iran). |
|
@pjf 👍 |
|
I don't think this has been mentioned in this conversation, but one important distinction between PayPal et al. and GitTip is that in the latter users have their own pages with their own name and avatar. This makes GitTip more like eBay shops than like PayPal. |
|
@pluma There is another huge reason why Gittip is such a step up over PayPal. The latter doesn't let you sell/endorse ephemeral products such as open source projects. You can get away with it for a while, but as it violates their anti-fraud directives doing so by the sender or recipient can get accounts locked without warning. |
|
@pydanny Yes, the reasoning being that just sending money to people is not a "donation" in the legal sense. I think it's still permissible to use PayPal for actual donations, though, isn't it? |
|
@pluma Yes, you can use PayPal for donations. However, the last time I tried to navigate the legalese of the PayPal TOS, doing so for open source projects and events was a violation. Open source is considered 'digital' or 'ephemeral', and they don't like that kind of thing. Yes, we can argue it any way we want, but it's really up to their anti-fraud division. |
Of course, this means coming up with a shared definition of what is "right" from Gittip's pov. That's a messy process in which we're unlikely to all agree, especially as Gittip scales. In fact, we'll start to end up with something that looks a lot like ... laws. No? :-) What I'm seeing is that companies basically are writing their own laws, and companies in general can now be powerful enough that their "laws" matter. The corporation rivals the state. We need to decide what Gittip's laws are, and how we're going to relate to the state. |
|
We now have "Guidelines for User Generated Content" in our Terms! :-) |
and others
Currently users are pretty unbound, we need to figure out if we want to support or prevent things like abusive usernames, pornographic avatars, spamming in the about me text, spamming with usernames, spamming with toots, etc.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: