Neutrality of technology in the Guadalajara declaration - DC3

11 Dec 2016

Dear all,

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:

*"We acknowledge that communication technology is not neutral and can
exacerbate unequal power relations in the community."*

...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