Dear Members (and especially our newest members),
Here come the last few pieces of our Charter for ratification.
HERE IS HOW THE PROCESS WORKS
All registered members may discuss and vote in this thread.
The text we are voting on is given below. In this case we are ratifying additions to three existing Articles to reflect a Privacy Policy. The full text is given here, with a link to the Article that is afffected.
Before voting, we discuss in this thread for a minimum of ten days. During those ten days, you should state bluntly in this thread anything you don’t like.. If enough people dislike certain provisions, we will remove them from the text before the voting begins and allow the committee to work on them again until they are more acceptable to the membership.
At the end of the discussion, the vote opens and remains open for ten days, two weekends inclusive. The vote takes the form of a poll in this thread, where you vote either yes or no to approve these pieces of the Charter.
The vote will remain open until Monday, August 8, 11:59 pm Greenwich Mean Time.
(Translation: voting from July 29, ~8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time or ~5:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time until August 8, ~8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time or ~5:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time. )
PRIVACY POLICY
Member Rights
In Article 2: Member Rights
¶1: Rights and responsibilities enforceable by procedures and penalties outlined in the Charter
A. You have the right:
We will ADD:
• to be protected from revelation of personal information about yourself that would compromise your privacy, and to have such information edited from any post at your request;
Rangers
In Article 3: Rangers (Administrators)
¶4: Routine Powers
......Rangers may not:
We will CHANGE:
• Edit or delete posts or lock threads without permission of the originator unless the originator has engaged in conduct justifying an immediate ban;
TO:
• Delete posts or lock threads without permission of the originator unless the originator has engaged in conduct justifying an immediate ban, or edit posts except in the circumstances specified in paragraph ¶5;
where ¶5 then refers specifically to the editing out of personal information that might compromise a person’s real life privacy
In Article 3: Rangers (Administrators)
¶5: Special and Emergency powers
We will CHANGE:
• Edit Posts if they contain objectionable content, for example: abuse of another poster, defamatory remarks, pornographic, violent or distasteful content, or advertisement of products.
TO:
• Edit Posts if they contain objectionable content (for example, abuse of another poster, defamatory remarks, pornographic, violent or distasteful content, or advertisement of products), or if they reveal personal information that compromises another poster's privacy or contain any personal information about a minor.
Dispute Resolution
In Article 5: Dispute Resolution
¶9: Offenses That Merit a Penalty
......Offenses for which the maximum penalty is a temporary ban if this is not the first offense and the problem appears to be persistent
We will ADD:
• Deliberately posting personal, real life information about another member such that their privacy is compromised, or posting any personal information about a minor.
Guidelines for the enforcement of this policy will be added to the Ranger Handbook to make it clear that adult members are not prohibited from giving information about themselves, nor are other members prohibited from responding to personal information revealed by the member who has the right to reveal it. The use of real life first names is not automatically prohibited because this does not compromise real life privacy, but if a member does not want their real life first name to appear on the board they may request that it be edited.
A member can only be called for a Hearing for violating the privacy policy if they are doing this persistently and have not complied with requests to stop. We have placed this offense in the same penalty category as inappropriate behavior in the age restricted forum.
In order to ratify this Article, 39 members must cast votes, and of those who vote, two-thirds (67%) must vote in favor.