Why think it is important for people to agree to a Statement of Fundamental Policies? Why enforce a policy of professionalism in behavior?
Anyone who has spent a lot of time working in online communities is familiar with certain types of problematic characters and certain patterns of bad behavior. Governance of online communities is very hard. But what makes it hard is that such communities are generally volunteer communities of equals, and in such communities, it is hard to get buy-in from participants for resting some decisionmaking authority in anyone’s hands. This may be a problem about the Internet’s thoroughgoing egalitarianism. This is why it is so important that online communities adopt constitutions which institute sensible, representative governance–as it were, just as real, offline communities do. See our Statement of Fundamental Policies. Beyond that, they should require their members to sign onto the rules explicitly, and then give the members a key stake in the governance of the project. We believe that giving members an active stake in governance gets them personally invested, and great things can result.
