Proposal: Adopt Harvey Birdman Rule

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Richard Fontana wrote at 02:13 (EST) on Sunday:
> I'd like to propose that the copyleft.org project adopt the Harvey
> Birdman Rule,

It's funny you say that, because effectively you beat me to it.  I was
thinking that I'd ask *you* this week if you would object to
copyleft.org using the HBR.

My repsonse is quite long, so I've broken it up into sections.
Sorry: I'm all about the "wall of text" when I write emails. ;)

Why HBR?
========

IMO, the clear argument in favor of HBR is to avoid historical dangers.
There is at least one other group who originally convened to disseminate
information to the public about copyleft with the best of intentions,
but then later closed up, excluded key community members and adopted a
restrictive discussion rule, such as the Chatham House Rule (CHR).  The
latter rule was designed to deal with complex international peace
discussions.  Surely, such a restrictive meeting rule is necessary when
you bring members of, say, the Israeli government and PLO into the same
room.  And, while I think copyleft and Free Software licensing is an
important topic mired in complex politics, it's many notches below on
the "contention-o-meter" than what the CHR was designed for.

In practice in our community, the CHR has been manipulated in the larger
Open Source and Free Software community as a tool to privatize
discussion about important policy issues into closed social clubs.  As
such, Fontana's invention of the HBR as a corrective measure to
preemptively curtail such problematic behavior was both insightful and
highly useful.

Why Not HBR?
============

That said, the HBR as currently drafted is effectively born from a
complex, multi-layered inside joke between me and Fontana.  I attempted
to explain this here:
  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/copyleft-next/2012-August/000074.html
  (and in the other emails in that thread on the copyleft-next list),

however, my explanations were never really adequate.  Like most inside
jokes, it's humor diminishes reverse-exponentially in the time it takes
to explain the joke [0].  I still can't tell if I'm troubled or
delighted by the irony that a discussion rule designed for complete
transparency was itself named based on a series of private jokes.  (I'm
leaning on the "delighted" side of that, since the HBR is to copyleft
what CHR is to copyright: a rule designed to use the system of private
discussion rules to encourage transparent discussion.)

Ultimately, a copyleft.org adoption of HBR will by far the hardest on me
to comply, since I'm doing (and have done over the last 15 years) 90% of
the work on the Guide, and I've done 98% of work on the copyleft.org
Wiki so far.  So, I'm inclined to make an executive decision to just
adopt HBR.

What Do you Think?
==================

That said, I'd welcome input from copyleft.org's "early adopters"
already gathered here on this list as to whether they have a strong
opinion about the HBR.


Question of Enforcement Discussion
==================================

My only reservation about HBR is a separate issue: long term, I've been
thinking about having a section of copyleft.org to discuss and
investigate GPL violations.  I'm not sure yet if copyleft.org is the
right place to host it (I was thinking of a subdomain,
SOMETHING.copyleft.org), but if I do that and HBR applies to all
activity of copyleft.org, HBR would cover any enforcement efforts hosted
here.

I am not terribly worried about that, because I don't think much of what
comes out of enforcement is not "substantive development" regarding
copyleft, and indeed, any "substantive development" would occur when an
enforcement action had enough unique things about it that it would turn
into a case study, in which case that would be added to the Case Studies
part of the tutorial.

However, I'd probably feel more comfortable if HBR§3 contained:

  Except in extraordinary cases, private telephone calls, private
  teleconferences, private in-person meetings, and private email
  communications shall not be used to discuss substantive development of
  any generally useful information regarding this project.

The change there would be to add "generally useful information", which
means that only generally useful information gleaned from enforcement
actions would need an HBR cure, and since community-oriented enforcement
actions always seek to get that anyway, it would be fitting and
appropriate.


Separating HBR From copyleft-next
=================================

Finally, Fontana, I think if you're going to propose HBR for other
projects, that the time has come for HBR to have its own Git repository.
I'm willing to do the work of extracting all commits from copyleft-next
that pertain to HBR into a fresh repository, but if I do so, would you
be agreeable to hosting HBR in a separate repository?  (And, will that
repository be on a hosting site that's Free Software, such as gitorious
or a local Kallithea or Gitlab instance?. ;)

Once we do that, I can propose my change above as a patch to HBR, which
would make me feel more confident adopting it for copyleft.org overall.

Footnote
========

[0] Reminds me of that old joke about a bunch of old IBM engineers had
    so many inside jokes that they'd get together at the pub after work
    and one engineer would say: "Eight-seven-two-nine-four-one" and the
    room would burst out laughing saying "that's the best joke I ever
    heard -- and you tell it so well!"

-- 
   -- bkuhn