Member Ethics

All members agree to abide by the following ethical standards. Failure to do so is grounds for a Member Removal Proposal and/or restorative justice process. Ethics are both personal commitments to specific behavioral and cultural patterns within the network as well as design ethics for systems and project outcomes.

Personal Ethics

Personal ethics refer to behavioral and cultural patterns of members. Members are encouraged to regularly engage in open and heart-felt self-and-peer reflection on their ethical practice.

• Good faith collaboration
  • Strong Adherence: Inquiring others how your project interfaces with theirs
  • Weak Adherence: Offering to include others in your project
  • Strong Violation: Demanding a member conform to your approach
  • Weak Violation: Subtly manipulating collaborators
• Honesty
  • Strong Adherence: Up front disclosure of all relevant information
  • Weak Adherence: Partial disclosure of information when requested
  • Strong Violation: Hiding relevant information
  • Weak Violation: Misrepresenting or manipulating information for personal interest
• Feedback and accountability
  • Strong Adherence: Inquiring the impact of your actions, asking others what you could have done better
  • Weak Adherence: Reluctantly agreeing to hear feedback from others
  • Strong Violation: Reacting angrily to feedback when shared
  • Weak Violation: Avoiding feedback and accountability
• Efficacy over ego
  • Strong Adherence: Shelving all or part of a project if another member is providing the same function with better results or more efficiently
  • Weak Adherence: Merging efforts for the same desired outcome
  • Strong Violation: Pushing a less effective or less developed project to maintain control
  • Weak Violation: Running identical projects in parallel to maintain control
• Inclusion & Listening
  • Strong Adherence: Actively engaging a wide range of members to seek their perspective
  • Weak Adherence: Remaining open to others adding their perspective
  • Strong Violation: Excluding competent members because of differences of perspective
  • Weak Violation: Hiding a project from some members

System Design Ethics

System design ethics refers to the ethical considerations for the practice of civic innovation. Members are encouraged to regularly engage in open and heart-felt self-and-peer reflection on their systemic design ethics.

• Resilience
  • Strong Adherence: Designing fractally with redundancies of key functions at all scales
  • Weak Adherence: Designing partial redundancy at some scales
  • Strong Violation: Designing systems that are dependent on large centralized functions
  • Weak Violation: Designing systems that partially rely on some centralized functions
• Vitality
  • Strong Adherence: Designing holistically for all levels of human and ecological well-being through regenerative feedback loops
  • Weak Adherence: Designing for some levels of human and ecological well-being
  • Strong Violation: Designing extractive processes that deplete human or ecological well-being
  • Weak Violation: Disregarding some aspects of well-being in process design
• Choice
  • Strong Adherence: Designing inclusive mechanisms of self-authorship and community ownership at the protocol level
  • Weak Adherence: Providing informed consent when direct self-authorship and community ownership is not included
  • Strong Violation: Designing walled gardens with no exit and no self-authorship or ownership
  • Weak Violation: Designing open source plugins for a walled garden ecosystem