Re: A GNU “social contract”?

[Alexandre François Garreau]

Le mercredi 6 novembre 2019, 22:11:03 CET Andreas a écrit :
> On Wed, 2019-11-06 at 19:31 +0100, Andreas Enge wrote:
> > 
> >
> > Let me quote once more the paragraph that we are supposedly
> > 
> > discussing:
> > > * GNU welcomes contributions from all and everyone
> > > We want to give everyone the opportunity to contribute to our
> > > efforts
> > > on any of the many tasks that require work.  We welcome all
> > > contributors,
> > > regardless of their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, level of
> > > experience, or any other personal characteristics.  We commit to
> > > providing
> > > a harassment-free experience for all our contributors.
> 
> What is wrong with:
> 
> "The GNU Project encourages contributions from anyone who wishes to
> advance the development of the GNU system, regardless of gender, race,
> ethnic group, physical appearance, religion, cultural background, and
> any other demographic characteristics, as well as personal political
> views." from the kind communications guidelines?
> 
> If you think having a social contract is a good idea, it might be more
> palatable to compose it of excerpts and paragraphs already available in
> the philosophy section of gnu.org and streamline those into one
> coherent document, indicating from which essays the various parts
> originate.
> 
> That way you end up with a consistent summary of the important ideas
> many GNU supporters already more-or-less agree on, and getting any
> adoption should prove far easier.

I like this idea.  Also you could divide that in two modules, one about 
software freedom, and another about kindness (that could be signed 
separately).  Then you would try to make people sign that to publicly show 
they support and behold GNU philosophy, so to provide a more formalized and 
explicit way of possibly untrusting specific people for newcomers, or easing 
the job of selecting discrimination among people for responsibilities, maybe 
even outside of GNU (for instance for Debian, which agrees on a lot coming 
from GNU).  But signature won’t be expected for being a GNU contributor, 
developer or project maintainer (but could be of help for formalizing a 
possibly more public process about helping/joining current teams Brandon 
listed, and advising the chief GNUisance).