Archive talk:Statement of Values

Is there a document that we are modeling this one after? I'm curious to see what other organizations have for a "statement of values". Some of these values seem so vague as to be meaningless. "Freedom and justice"? What does that mean? And why are freedom and justice a single value? Are we discussing positive liberty or negative liberty?
 * I don't remember exactly where I got the idea, but my basic concept behind a "statement of values" is to answer the question: What do we stand for? The Mission Statement should answer what concerns us, what is our reason for being -- but what do we believe in? Now, if we choose to adopt a mission statement that's different from UF's, the ideas of this document could be integrated with the mission statement. Or perhaps these ideas get included in the "expanded" mission statement: one that's not just 2 sentances, but tries to explain itself.


 * The closest comparison I can find to this statement of values would be the Green Party's Ten Key Values. The document changes slightly depending which Green party you ask, but you can get the idea. You see that this document is broader than what would be included in a short mission statement. You can see that it's broader than individual policy issues. The question is, what are the values of FreeCulture.org -- and of the free culture movement? We've had this debate, but we let other people set the agenda. Are we communists? No, we say. Are we 100% free marketeers? We're not that either, we say. Are we civil libertarians? Sort of, we say. So the question is, when are we going to define ourselves -- not by individual legal or social issues, but by trying to describe the big picture?


 * Now, this draft is just a draft. I've tried to pair up values where they seem complementary, where one word doesn't really capture the whole idea: for instance, neither openness nor transparency alone describe the full range of our concern in that area, but combined they seem to illuminate the question more. I'm not dead-set on the issues here, or their pairings or order; I'm not sure whether this covers all the ground it needs to, or if it's overly broad. I think there are probably elements of both positive and negative liberty involved: to be honest, I've never found those ideas to be particularly interesting, and it's not something I really concern myself with here. I think, as in the Greens' values, we will want to have a short paragraph to explain what we mean, not just a buzzword. But I do think we want to sketch out what we believe in as a movement, to have some yardstick by which to judge our actions and policies. -- Gavin 01:12, 21 Dec 2005 (EST)