There was quite a bit of disagreement on the language used in the declaration, partially because the sentence was added there only today, without the acceptance wider community. I think it was poor judgement to add it today without any discussion with all the members of our Dynamic Coalition. However, now that it's out there, and we ended up spending almost two hours of our precious time on these sudden additions, we might as well include this, admittedly fair point. Here are my proposals of the different variations on just one sentence that could be used instead.

One of the sentences that was discussed, is as follows:

...and here are my suggestions. I wrote the crucial changes in bold:

1) We acknowledge that communication technologies are not always neutral and can exacerbate unequal power relations in the community.

2) We acknowledge that the usage of communication technology is not neutral and can exacerbate unequal power relations in the community.

3) We acknowledge that community networks are not neutral and can exacerbate unequal power relations in the community.

As you can see, my suggestions are not making that much change to the spirit of the meaning, but just wording it differently will actually make our statement more accurate and popular, as well as less controversial. The declaration should really alienate as few people as possible and we really need to keep that in mind, while still making a definitive statement that is actually saying something.

I.e. the hammer itself IS neutral (although people with no hands won't be able to use it properly. Also, we're all babies at some point and babies won't be able to lift the hammer). It is really the usage of the hammer that can be used in non-neutral way and is the most important acknowledgement, that we DO need for this specific declaration. My first suggestion captures this point of view sufficiently enough.

I feel that all of us agreed on the spirit of the sentence, and I also think that my first suggestion is the one that would really be the best for our purposes. It takes into the account the fact, that community networks can be misused (for example, in an unequal way considering gender), but it's not saying that community networks are not neutral by default. Even if they were (and I don't think they are), I feel that's an unnecessarily negative statement and we should avoid those in our otherwise very positive vision.

Somebody suggested to use a differentiating platform (like GitHub?) for the comparison of the crucial sentences and paragraphs in the declaration and I think that's a very good idea. Then we can vote on different versions of them and decide which ones are the best for our purposes. We obviously need to build consensus on our constitution and hopefully the output of that will be a declaration/constitution that we can all agree on.

Thanks,

-Raoul