getting started

Hi folks, here's very roughly where I think we are and what we want to 
do, as a very drafty starting point:

Sometimes computer systems are owned and operated by one person/group of 
people  (the "provider") and act on behalf of another person/group of 
people (the "user").   This includes web hosting providers, cloud 
storage providers, email providers, and many, many other services.  As 
people increasingly move their lives online, the opportunity increases 
for providers to act in ways which subtly or unexpectedly harm users or 
betray their trust.

Some providers are committed to being trustworthy, to being respectful 
of the autonomy and privacy of the users.

The goal of this Community Group is to give those providers a way to 
distinguish themselves in the market from the broader class of 
providers.  We plan to do this by producing a standard Terms of Service 
document that providers can use to show that commitment. For now, we 
call this document the Respectful Terms of Service (RTOS). In the 
interest of communicating this concept to a the market, we might use a 
different term later.   (Also, we don't mean to be saying others are not 
respectful.  There is room for reasonable people to disagree about what 
constitutes this kind of respect.)

The RTOS will serve as a baseline.  Providers are free to make 
additional commitments, as long as they do not reduce the commitment.   
(Might those go in an SLA?)

We'll start with a document that makes sense in layperson English, then 
materialize that in appropriate legalese for different legal systems 
(Creative Commons seems like the model for this).

How's that sound?

     -- Sandro

Received on Friday, 4 December 2015 17:35:29 UTC