Communications Forums and Free Speech

[Mitchell Baker]

One set of reactions to the Planet Mozilla blog has been of the "We all
have a right to free speech. I believe Mozilla should never limit a
person's right to way what they want on any topic."

To me, the idea of free speech the beginning of a dissuasion, not the
end. Does an appreciation of free speech mean that Mozilla
infrastructure and community and reach is available to every Mozillian
as a right for any view?

In other words:

-- I have a right to free speech -- have much are you required to listen
to me?

-- I have a right to free speech -- how much should the Mozilla
community and infrastructure be my megaphone? Does this vary depending
on whether the issue is related to Mozilla activities or not?

--How much should participation in Mozilla activities be interwoven with
contentious or divisive non-Mozilla issues?

--If we don't *require* exposure, do we "facilitate" it?

My own view is "not much" on the requiring exposure and "a lot more" on
the facilitation side.

In other words, how much should the Mozilla community be required to
experience to my views on non-Mozilla issues? Not much. How much
should Mozilla be my megaphone? Not much. How much should
participation in Mozilla be intertwined with hearing my views on
non-Mozilla issues? Not much.

I know this is mushy. I suspect both the "always OK" and "never OK"
positions are difficult and will cause more trouble than they are worth.
I personally don't want to end up evaluating email signature and such
-- is the commercial "sent by my [add device name here] " more or less
objectionable than a personal comment?

A "not much" level requires flexibility by everyone. That is
flexibility in not including things that alienate other Mozillians, and
flexibility from all of us in letting some things go. I suspect that
if we try to go further we will end up deep in content, where we will
not agree.

This is why I'm leaning towards a default that mozilla channels are
mozilla-related, with easy ways to get to the full stream / full
personality of Mozillians.

In short, I do not agree that an appreciation of free speech means that
Mozilla infrastructure and community and reach is available to every
Mozillian as a right for all ideas.

Mitchell

[da...@illsley.org]

I completely agree.

In fact that was my understanding of the status quo, with planet being the
place you go for the full stream... but that turns out to be a very 200x
view of the world. It seems to have morphed into a core required news
resource, which may make it ineligible To be the full stream.

While I agree there's no right to unlimited free speech using Mozilla
resources, I think it is important to have a Mozilla environment for the
full stream. Simply saying 'go get to know each other on Facebook' would be
a far poorer experience [1].

David

[1] I assume this isn't what people have been meaning by (roughly) 'there
are other options these days', but it's a possibility on the spectrum of
options

[da...@illsley.org]

Its been pointed out that I snipped too much and my NNTP client isn't doing
threading right, so to clarify, I agree completely with Mitchell.

[Robert Kaiser]

Mitchell Baker schrieb:

> --If we don't *require* exposure, do we "facilitate" it?
>
> My own view is "not much" on the requiring exposure and "a lot more" on
> the facilitation side.

I'm absolutely with you here.
On the concrete example, I think that we should *facilitate* a blog
aggregator with the style and very open rules that Planet Mozilla has
(actually, I'd like one with *more* personal posts than our planet has
right now) but we should never *require* a Mozilla community member to
read that one.
If we require people to read such an aggregation for being a productive
community member, we should have one that is on topic directly related
to Mozilla mission-related activities (that includes all our "official"
Mozilla projects) only, no political/religious views, no "I went
hiking", no "cool book review", no "come to my
LGBT/feminist/Obama-campaign/christian/etc. meetup", no "why air travel
sucks", no "what Mac todo lists I've tried" stuff. We shouldn't require
anyone to read that.
Still, we have a ton of people in our community who don't meet and
casually hang out with other Mozilla people every day, like some
"privileged" people in areas with Mozilla Spaces have, so rarely get to
know the non-work personalities of Mozillians. We should have a blog
feed that can provide all that info in breadth, a feed nobody is
*required* to read at all, a feed that has all those posts so not every
one interested needs to manually subscribe to hundreds of feeds and
change them if someone changes his blog or whatever. I don't care about
its name, but until now, it was Planet Mozilla. We should continue to
have something that wide, we should facilitate Mozillians being able to
get to know each other's personalities, because Mozilla is ultimately
about the wide variety of *people* supporting our mission and Manifesto.


IMHO, in the end it's not about freedom of speech, in the end it's about
having a place where we can freely easily exchange all kinds of blog
posts about our personalities.

(And why blogs and not social networks? Basically because blogs are
decentralized, can be controlled by people themselves and are open to
anyone - which e.g. Facebook isn't, without an account I can't even read
anything and it's all owned by one single entity.)

Robert Kaiser