The past few days have seen lots of interesting commentary in the iCommons community, kicked off by my suggestions about governance and finances. I'm really glad to say that the iCommons Board of Directors are open to including the community and working through these issues properly. Suffice to say that I was happy with the outcome of a discussion about core values in IRC this morning, which would help with the implementation of some ethical policies I drafted on fundraising and purchasing.

But I want to address one or two issues that have come up in blogs and especially in the IRC conversation this evening. Here are two paraphrased quotes that illustrate the main problems well:

there is no need to define a set of core values, I say instead that people's work and contributions to icommons defines their values - buridan1

I can give an example of something from the morning conversation that I think is not a core value, and which should be avoided... carbon neutrality, which has no obvious connection to free culture. Adopting policies publicly and with a lot of fanfare about stuff like that would be exclusionary of people I think we ought to be including - Jimmy Wales

Some people, the above two included, have expressed a hands-off (or for the academically included, laissez faire) approach for iCommons: let the network evolve, don't overburden it with issues that aren't directly related. Some even go so far as to suggest that the strength of Creative Commons is its focus on tools rather than ideology, as though all the activists and advocates are merely interested in tools and have no ideological reasons to support CC (such as believing in freedom of access to information, for example).

Core values and good governance are required for some things!

As I wrote in my original article, when you're passing declarations ostensibly in the name of the free culture community, or even the iCommons community, this won't do. The move towards an iCommons Community Council is really positive because it legitimises the process of making declarations. It means the free culture community can have a global voice.

Laissez faire just hands power to celebrities, hyperactive participants and the particularly committed individuals, distorting the views of the wider community. It would, for example, be wrong for iCommons to simply adopt those policies I proposed on the basis of my work and the views of a couple of Board members. They should be scrutinised, debated and passed by the community at large or by their elected representatives.

We shouldn't restrict our core values to the commons

The second issue I have with the laissez faire crowd is that it's just a clever way of shirking moral responsibilities. Maybe carbon neutrality, or opposing sweatshop labour, aren't directly conneced to free culture, but should that stop iCommons from adopting policies to deal with two of the most pressing ethical and political issues of our time? If Apple can adopt a reasonable ethical code of conduct for suppliers why can't iCommons?

Now we don't want the core values of iCommons to include every little platform shared by a few community members. But for me, if iCommons doesn't include a commitment to basic human rights, environmental responsibility and the like then I'm not interested. It's not a matter of saying: if you don't subscribe to this long list of ideological ideals then you can't come and play. It's more about a charity with funds, staff, merchandise etc. and that plays a major role in the free culture community doing all it can to be open, democratic and ethical about its conduct.

Core values are a useful tool

People worry that, if made explicit, the core values will scare people away, or harm a happy community by promoting debate and discord. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We don't need to exclude projects from being iCommons nodes, nor should we prevent people from attending events and participating in democratic processes, just because they don't subscribe to everything that the core values entail. But as an organisation with staff and a budget, iCommons must take a stand on fundamental ethical issues such as: will we sell merchandise made by exploited child labourers? should we try to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions to meet the challenges of global warming? and so on.

Core values can (for example) be the basis upon which iCommons rejects a sponsor (because the potential sponsor's activities conflict with iCommons core values, e.g. they lobby for software patents). They shouldn't limit the scope for policy decisions, so iCommons can pass policy on carbon neutrality even if that's not a core value.

Core values also act as a rallying point, something more specific and visionary than "look at these groups who find some kind of common cause". You can either make the core values explicit through an open, transparent and participatory process, or you can wait until they sink the organisation in bitter disputes over sponsors, bad projects, whether or not particular licenses are free enough, and so on.

Finally, if we never define some core values for iCommons then we are in danger of ignoring the volcanoes simmering away in the background. What if iCommons became increasingly close to Microsoft due to sponsorship arrangements? Imagine if a small gathering of iCommoners at a summit passed a policy saying that iCommons condones piracy? Core values and clear governance structures get the important disagreements out in the open, and help the community manage them sensibly.

What's the obsession with wikis?

In the morning discussion we decided that a working group would be set-up to discuss core values. Chaired by an academic and largely composed of active community members, they would present a paper to the community four months in advance of the next iSummit, giving everyone time to digest and debate its contents before making some decisions at the summit. Now it seems that the working group has been dropped in favour of drafting it on a wiki. The following quote from buridan, who thoroughly opposed the core values idea, says it all:

perhaps a wiki statment of values program will provide evidence to some of what i've been talking about, [that the community won't agree]

How on earth is a diverse and largely disconnected community supposed to develop a statement of core values with nothing more than a wiki page? This isn't a Wikipedia style project, this requires experience, careful consideration, well facilitated discussions, position papers and the like. Thankfully Heather Ford was wise enough to suggest that, if the wiki approach fails, the working group will be set-up.

If I hear or read one more plonker going on about some mythical, utopian open source community where people just group around nice projects and everything is hunky dory I'm going to scream. Maybe in a safe middle class world where we can shut ourselves off from other issues, fine. But I doubt the exploited worker, the community suffering from climate change, or the people who fume when iCommons coseys up to Microsoft because of sponsorship deals, will be quite so enthusiastic about this laissez faire utopia.