Instagram and Project Values; talking in Circles
>>>>> "Bagas" == Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com> writes:
Bagas> I understand your request for an official channel of
Bagas> communication from Debian but as others have explained well
Bagas> it's not trivial to support Instagram as it conflicts with
Bagas> the project values (see above).
This statement keeps being repeated, and I feel a need to jump in and
say that the situation is at best far more complex than that.
Many project members find Instagram and Facebook highly problematic.
However, our project's values are codified in the Social Contract.
The Social Contract is a commitment between Debian and the free software
community *about the operating system we produce* and about our stance
on openness and giving back to the community.
These guidelines are intended to be a high standard we set for how we
conduct ourselves and what we produce. But they are also very narrowly
scoped to that operating system.
We want a wide community of people to contribute to Debian. We welcome
FSF members. we welcome corporate contributors who will stop
contributing to Debian the moment someone stops paying them to do so.
You don't need to believe free software is good to work on Debian. You
simply need to write free software and uphold the social contract in
your Debian work. The
social contract is not a restriction on what you believe to be part of
Debian; it is a commitment to how you will conduct yourself here.
The social contract explicitly acknowledges that our users desire
non-free components. It explicitly acknowledges our commitment to
support that and to not get in the way.
Using Instagram for critical project communications so that project
members had to follow it might well be
problematic under the social contract; I don't know because the
consensus against doing so is so strong that I don't even think we could
have a discussion of what the social contract implications would be.
Using instagram to talk to our users is a much more complex case.
Supporting our users who need or desire non-free services is something
we do.
BUT IT DOESN't MATTER. Until we have people volunteering to create
content, there is no point in having a discussion of how official
something is. And unless the publicity team wants to spend the time to
make something official it won't be. That decision on their part is as
much a decision of where they want to focus their time as project
values.
I personally believe that we've discussed Instagram more than is useful
until people produce content.
So, as an individual developer, I ask you to drop instagram discussion
except for focused discussion around recruiting people to create
content. I ask you to be very careful of claiming that something is
incompatible with our values. Every time you do that you make our
community more closed, more exclusive. Sometimes that is necessary: the
Nvidia drivers really are non-free as an example. We are a place where
people from all spectrums can meet if they are willing to produce a free
operating system.
Please be careful in limiting it.
And if you do need to discuss what our project values are, please do it
somewhere that is not debian-publicity.
--Sam
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