hey!
> I'm asking for comments on this new document:
>
> https://tails.boum.org/contribute/mission/
First of all, thanks for writing this document!
At first glance, I agree with both intri's correction with regard to the
link to our social contract, and segfault's hesitations about the
personality traits. I'd propose to remove the personality traits
entirely.
> I changed the name of the document to "mission and values" a bit at the
> last moment. I'm aware that this might require some explanation because
> it sounds much stronger than "identity". I didn't want to call it "brand
> attributes" because it doesn't look like us. The document included a
> "mission" (including its audience) that we extracted for some of the
> workshops at the summit and some adjectives that sounded a lot like
> ethical "values".
I'm very happy to see values that are based on both autonomy and
collectivity (e.g., "put people in control of their digital lives" and
"not an individual matter"). This places a nice and well-needed
counterweight to the liberal discourse of privacy as an individual
right.
What I miss from a values statement is a bit stronger political
positioning. While I understand there are pragmatic reasons for
maintaining a non-ideological appearance, I do think it is important for
this document not to completely ignore/negate where we come from. At the
very least, including antifascism in our values seems appropriate for
the times we are living in, and may help to make it easier to deal with
nazis using Tails (c.f.,
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon/
). If nobody has immediate objections to such a positioning, I'll take
some time to write a concrete proposal.
> What started being a tool for branding and UX, ended up being probably
> the strongest ethical statement of the project so far. I want to be
> really careful about this but I think that both have to go hand-in-hand.
Couldn't agree more :)
x,
l.
