Members Bill of Rights
From BeVolunteer Wiki
Philosophy and Values
( Democracy - Transparency - Privacy - Trust - Decentralization - How We Want To Keep BW - Members Bill of Rights )
The idea of this page is to develop a Members Bill of Rights, which will hopefully be put to the General Assembly of BeVolunteer to vote into the statutes. For the time being we can work towards adoption within BeWelcome.
This is a draft for a universal bill or rights for members of (online) social networks. BeWelcome would be an ideal organization to adopt this bill of rights.
Contents |
Bill of member rights
As a member of this social networking site:
- I have the right to fully use the intended functionality of the website, regardless of my race, gender or socio-cultural background.
- My use of the service shall be free of cost.
- I have the right to participate in the decision making process that governs this site.
- I have the right to full organizational transparency for all matters that affect me personally or the community to which I subscribed. This includes access to the bookkeeping and to a record of all organizational decisions and debates.
- I have the right to physical and social safety within the service. I understand my personal responsibility in providing this safety for others members as well.
- I have the right to choose the way my personal data is being used in the network. My personal data can not be shared, sold or otherwise distributed without my explicit consent. I have the right to hide, modify, export or remove the personal data that I have entered in the site. I have a right to cancel my membership.
- I have a right to view the code that is being used to run this site.
These right are inalienable and can not be withdrawn.
What does it all mean?
- This means that there can be no "special" features (excluding administrative functionality of course) available that only certain members have access to. This means there shall never be different "classes" of users. Note that this only covers "intended" use, so using the site as it wasn't intended (malicious or otherwise) is *not* a right. Also note that certain restrictions might be applied to membership, such as a minimum age, but you can not be discriminated based on gender, race or socio-cultural background.
- This means the use of the website or of any functionality has to be completely free (as in beer) and unlimited. You may be asked for donations, but it can never be required.
- This means that there is a way for me to be involved in the organization that regulates the social network. This might be through direct voting, a representation structure or other system.
- This means all decisions that are being made can be read online, I can see how decisions were reached and how donation money is being used.
- This means all reasonable measures will be taken to ensure my personal safety. However, my personal safety is equally my responsibility, by keeping in mind good practice and general guidelines.
- By personal data we mean your contact details and identification data (address, phone numbers, email, name, etc), profile data (description, pictures, ...) and comments you have left others. Collaborative data (Wiki pages, code, forum discussion) are not included. Keep in mind that unauthorized use of a service may result in you losing this right, in essence you might end up on a blacklist (you have consented to this by registering).
- This means I can see what the software is actually capable of doing. The code can, for instance, be published under an open source license, or other system.
Member Rights
- Note that the following listing already existed online before the above list of rights was drafted.
Members shall have the following rights:
- Ownership of their own personal information, including:
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;
- Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
- Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Sites supporting these rights shall:
- Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
- Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
- Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
- Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.
- based on ..
The syndication and Open Data stuff seems to fall under the right to export personal data and I believe to be a far too technical to be included in a Bill of Rights. A bill of rights (to me) would be about general principles a site agrees to, not as much how it is implemented. --Tgoorden 20:59, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
Possible additions
- Members have the right to use the site without advertising.
- Members have the right to have their information shown without advertising. (Part of Right #2.)
I don't think this is a "right". I think members could have the option to pay for this if they choose to, but I don't think it's a "right". It costs money to host web sites, so unless the user is willing to pay their share of that cost, I don't think they have the right to get it for free. SCallum 01:19, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
- Bill of " Responsibilities "
see minute 2,08 on this video :
Indigenous Native American Elders Speak part 2
Technical implementation
The implementation of these rights will take time. Before these rights can be adopted they will have to be coded.
