Community Principles and Stewardship Commitment

The Joshternet is a hub for Joshes and non-Joshes alike. It is meant to be fun, not exclusive. Everyone is welcome to join in the joshing.

Independent sites stay independent. The network connects people and the places they maintain without owning their identities or their work.

That only works if the community surrounding the technology follows the same spirit as the technology itself.

This is the Joshternet commitment. It states the community we are building, the behavior expected within Joshternet community spaces, and the commitments accepted by anyone entrusted with stewardship of the Joshternet project, its specifications, repositories, services, and shared infrastructure.

It is a living community document rather than a normative protocol specification. It does not replace the Joshternet RFCs. It does not define who is a Josh. It does not give the Joshternet authority over independently operated websites or the people behind them.

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Community principles

People come before the network

The Joshternet exists to help people discover people and the things they create.

Specifications, crawlers, registries, directories, websites, and other infrastructure are tools toward that purpose. They should never become more important than the people they are intended to serve.

Technology should contribute to human creativity, knowledge, connection, opportunity, and the betterment of the communities it touches.

Participation is voluntary

People choose whether and how they participate.

Joining should be easy. Leaving should be easy. No one should be pressured to participate, remain listed, publish additional information, or interact with another participant.

Participation does not surrender control of a person’s website, content, infrastructure, or identity.

Identity belongs to the person

Joshness is declared, never derived.

No maintainer, crawler, registry, algorithm, contributor, or other Josh gets to decide someone else’s Josh identity.

People should also be free to change or withdraw their declaration without having to justify that decision to the community.

No Josh outranks another Josh

The Joshternet does not exist to establish a hierarchy of Joshes.

Popularity, follower counts, traffic, technical ability, tenure, contribution history, employment, wealth, influence, or proximity to project maintainers do not make one Josh more Josh than another.

Contributing more may create additional responsibility. It does not create additional Joshness.

Independent places matter

The interesting part of the Joshternet is not the Joshternet website.

It is the collection of independent websites, projects, writing, art, experiments, ideas, and wonderfully strange corners of the web that people maintain for themselves.

The Joshternet should send people outward into those places rather than trying to pull everything inward.

Freedom of expression and responsibility

Expression should be broad

The Joshternet values a web where people can express ideas, opinions, beliefs, criticism, humor, art, disagreement, and unpopular points of view.

People should be able to question specifications, institutions, cultural practices, political or philosophical ideas, technologies, community decisions, and one another’s arguments without fearing removal merely because the discussion is uncomfortable or unpopular.

Being offended by an idea is not, by itself, evidence that community rules have been violated.

Disagreement is not harassment.

Criticism is not abuse.

The ability to speak openly is important to a healthy community.

Expression does not excuse harmful conduct

Freedom of expression does not provide permission to threaten people, stalk them, expose private information, exploit children, organize harassment, defraud others, or deliberately place people in danger.

The distinction should generally be based on conduct and identifiable harm rather than whether a viewpoint is popular.

Community rules should therefore be applied to behavior as consistently as practical, regardless of the opinions, beliefs, identities, politics, or affiliations of the people involved.

Independent publishing remains independent

The Joshternet does not control what participants publish on independently operated websites.

Participation in the Joshternet does not make the Joshternet the editor, publisher, or owner of those sites.

At the same time, no Joshternet-operated service is required to host, index, recommend, display, or distribute every piece of content it encounters.

A crawler declining to index something is not redefining the publisher’s identity.

A community space removing material from that space does not remove it from the web.

Interoperability does not require interaction, and freedom of expression does not require compelled amplification.

Respect and acceptable behavior

Participants in Joshternet-operated community spaces should:

• engage honestly and in good faith;
• disagree with ideas without turning disagreements into personal attacks;
• respect another person’s privacy and personal boundaries;
• allow people to disengage from conversations;
• welcome questions and newcomers;
• criticize decisions, implementations, specifications, and institutions directly when criticism is warranted;
• make reasonable efforts to understand people from different backgrounds and experiences;
• correct mistakes when they become apparent;
• avoid intentionally disrupting discussions or preventing others from participating;
• consider the audience and context when sharing sensitive material.

Directness is welcome.

Disagreement is welcome.

Criticism is welcome.

Personal intimidation is not.

Behavior we will not accept

Joshternet-operated community spaces and services should not be used for:

• credible threats or encouragement of violence against another person;
• stalking, intimidation, or sustained targeted harassment;
• publishing another person’s sensitive private information without permission;
• sexual exploitation or abuse of children;
• grooming or sexualization of minors;
• distributing child sexual abuse material;
• non-consensual intimate imagery or sexual exploitation;
• fraud, phishing, impersonation for malicious purposes, or deliberate scams;
• malware or activity intended to compromise another person’s systems;
• repeated unwanted sexual attention;
• deliberate attempts to drive someone from the community through coordinated abuse;
• sustained disruption intended to prevent others from participating;
• knowingly using Joshternet infrastructure to facilitate unlawful exploitation or serious harm.

These rules apply to conduct rather than requiring everyone to share the same beliefs.

A person should not be removed merely for disagreeing with another participant, challenging prevailing opinions, expressing an unpopular idea, or criticizing the project or its maintainers.

Children, vulnerable people, and audience responsibility

The open web reaches people of many ages, backgrounds, cultures, and circumstances.

Joshternet-operated public spaces should therefore be suitable for the audiences they are intended to serve.

Content involving explicit sexuality, graphic violence, or other material reasonably unsuitable for general audiences should not be unexpectedly presented in general community spaces.

Where legitimate mature material is relevant, services should use appropriate context, warnings, labeling, filtering, or age restrictions where practical.

Material exploiting children has no place in the Joshternet’s services or community spaces.

Protecting children and people vulnerable to exploitation takes priority over providing distribution for exploitative material.

Audience awareness should not become an excuse to remove difficult ideas, educational material, legitimate artistic work, historical information, health information, or serious discussion simply because those subjects may be uncomfortable.

Context matters.

Respect disagreement and curiosity

People will disagree about specifications, implementations, governance, design, moderation, culture, and probably the correct pluralization of Josh.

Disagreement should be direct, constructive, and focused on improving the work. People should be able to question an idea without questioning another person’s right to participate.

Being wrong should be survivable.

Changing your mind should be encouraged.

People should be able to say difficult things respectfully, and other people should be able to challenge those things just as openly.

Make room for different ways of participating

Not everyone who contributes will be a Josh.

Not every Josh will write code.

People may contribute through websites, testing, documentation, design, discussion, implementation experience, artwork, events, community work, criticism, or simply by participating in the network.

The Joshternet should remain understandable and approachable enough that participation does not require belonging to a particular technical culture.

Keep the web human

The Joshternet can use automation without becoming a network designed for machines.

Crawlers can discover sites. Validators can check declarations. Software can help maintain infrastructure.

The destination should still be people.

And because this is, after all, a network of Joshes built on the web, there should always be room for experimentation, personality, weird websites, bad jokes, and having some fun with the whole thing.

Stewardship commitment

Stewardship is responsibility for the project. It is not ownership of the network.

Anyone entrusted with maintaining Joshternet repositories, specifications, domains, services, registries, crawlers, community spaces, or other shared infrastructure should accept the following commitments.

We will steward the project, not control the network

The Joshternet project may maintain specifications and shared infrastructure.

It does not own participating websites, participant identities, or the network created when independent sites interoperate.

No project service should become a required gatekeeper for participation.

We will protect participant independence

Participating websites should remain independently operable.

Shared infrastructure should be replaceable wherever practical. A registry, crawler, directory, validator, domain, repository, or organization should not become an authority simply because it is widely used.

The network should be able to outlive any particular implementation.

We will protect open expression

Stewards should not use moderation, infrastructure control, repository access, or administrative authority to silence criticism, settle personal disagreements, or enforce ideological conformity.

Project decisions may be challenged.

Maintainers may be criticized.

Specifications may be questioned.

Community members may disagree with one another.

Stewardship requires tolerating disagreement, including disagreement directed at the stewards themselves.

We will protect people from abuse

The commitment to open expression does not require the project to provide infrastructure for exploitation, threats, harassment, fraud, or serious harm.

When intervention is necessary, stewards should act against the harmful conduct as narrowly as reasonably possible.

Responses should consider context, severity, repetition, intent where it can reasonably be established, and actual or reasonably foreseeable harm.

Restrictions should not be broader than necessary merely because broader restrictions are administratively easier.

We will not turn infrastructure into identity authority

JoshBot may discover a Josh.

A registry may record a Josh.

A validator may confirm that a declaration follows a specification.

None of them create a Josh.

Operational decisions about indexing, security, abuse, moderation, or interaction must remain separate from a person’s authority to declare their own Josh identity.

We will minimize what we collect

The Joshternet should collect and retain only information reasonably necessary for the services it provides.

Participation should not require unnecessary personal information.

Where infrastructure stores public information discovered from participating sites, its purpose and behavior should be documented clearly.

We will make important project decisions in public

Specifications, proposals, significant architectural changes, community rules, and governance changes should be developed through publicly reviewable processes whenever practical.

Decisions should leave a history that later contributors can understand.

Disagreement should not disappear simply because a maintainer has merge access.

Privacy, security incidents, abuse reports, information concerning minors, and similarly sensitive matters may require confidential handling.

Transparency does not require exposing victims or private information.

We will apply community rules fairly

Community rules should describe behavior clearly enough that people can reasonably understand what is expected of them.

Enforcement should not depend on whether a steward agrees with someone’s opinions.

Similar conduct should receive similar consideration.

People accused of ordinary community violations should, where safety permits, be told what conduct created the problem and given a reasonable opportunity to respond.

Serious threats, exploitation, illegal material, security emergencies, or immediate risks of harm may require immediate action.

We will distinguish stewardship from privilege

Maintainers may need additional permissions to operate repositories, infrastructure, community spaces, or services.

Those permissions exist to perform work on behalf of the project.

They do not establish greater Joshness, permanent authority, or ownership of the community.

We will resist unnecessary centralization

Convenience will sometimes justify shared services.

Convenience alone should not quietly turn those services into mandatory infrastructure.

When the project introduces centralized components, we should ask whether they can remain optional, replaceable, independently implementable, or reproducible by others.

We will protect the ability to leave

A participant should be able to stop participating without asking permission from the Joshternet.

Removing an authoritative participation declaration should be respected by Joshternet-operated systems as those systems update.

Leaving the network should not require surrendering a domain, account, identity, content, or anything else the participant already owned.

We will not sell standing in the network

Money, sponsorship, advertising, employment, donations, or commercial relationships must not determine whether someone is recognized as a Josh, whether a valid implementation conforms to a specification, or where someone stands relative to another participant.

Shared infrastructure may eventually require funding.

Funding must not purchase Joshness.

We will plan for stewardship beyond the founder

The Joshternet should not depend forever on one person being available.

As sustained independent participation develops, stewardship should expand with it. Responsibilities, access, decision-making processes, and succession should become more explicit as the community demonstrates the need for them.

Governance should grow from actual participation rather than inventing representatives for a community that does not yet exist.

We will leave room to improve this commitment

This document is a starting point, not a claim that every future community question has already been answered.

Changes should be discussed publicly and should preserve the fundamental relationship between the Joshternet and its participants:

The people own their places.

The people own their identities.

People should be free to speak and free to disagree.

Freedom should be exercised with responsibility toward other people.

Children and vulnerable people should be protected from exploitation.

Stewards take care of the project.

No steward owns the network.

No Josh outranks another Josh.

And the Joshternet should remain just weird enough to be worth wandering through.