The title of the group is The Egyptian GNU/Linux Users Group - مجموعة مستخدمى جنو/لينكس فى مصر.
The lug shall be referred to as EGLUG - جنو/لينكس مصر
the domain name of the group shall be eglug.org
There are no costs for membership. Membership shall be open to all, Only requirement is accepting this charter, anyone who has an account in the eglug.org website is considered a member.
All members are bound by this charter.
Active members will be designated Senior Members through a transparent, fair, objective and preferably automated process
Senior Members don't have more rights, but are empowered with direct access to more eglug.org resources without having to go through moderators and administrators.
The moderator's primary responsibility is to ensure the content of the order to ensure that eglug.org remains accessible and useful to all its members.
Moderators shall also interfere in disputes arising between members to ensure the dispute never becomes hostile.
Moderators are expected to facilitate and encourage member contribution and to empower members to participate in all aspects of the eglug.org website.
The composition of the moderators team shall be determined through a
The administrator is a person who has the ultimate responsibility for the eglug.org website, administrators hold the keys and passwords to the website account and are responsible for implementing and maintaining the technical requirements of the community.
The duties and responsibilities of administrators include the duties of moderators as described in Article 5 of this document.
Administrators shall not implement changes that affect the existing core functionality of the eglug website without first seeking the approval of the community through an open and democratic process as described in Article 7 of this document.
The composition of the administrators team shall be determined through
Voting is the fundamental process that ensures the democratic nature of EGLUG an administrator's or moderator's failure to implement this process is considered a violation of their mandate and shall be
All members are eligible to vote on all decisions, except small decisions concerning a single event or activity, in that case only members participating in the event/activity are eligible to vote.
Voting matters shall initially be discussed within the community, a matter is approved for voting if it is presented on the website with 27 approvals, to simplify the process each senior user approval counts as 3 approvals, and each moderator/administrator approval counts as 9 approvals.
Minimum number of votes for a poll to be considered valid shall be 51% the number of senior users, moderators and administrators.
When a matter is approved for vote, it will be posted as a poll by an administrator or moderator within 48 hours of approval> All eglug members will be alerted to the poll through reasonable means, an announcement shall be published on the eglug.org homepage, and the poll will remain open for at least 10 days.
A request for vote can include within a request for a longer polling period, approval of the request shall be taken to mean approval of the proposed polling period.
If the minimum number of votes is not reached by the end of the polling period, the poll remains open for another polling period.
If after the second polling period the minimum number of votesis not reached yet, this shall be considered a sign that active members are being alienated, the whole community shall embark on a discussion of the roots of the problem.
if throught eh discussion the community agrees on the importance of reaching a descision on the voting matter, the poll remains open for a third voting period the result of the poll after the 3 periods is sufficient.
A two third majority in the poll will be considered conclusive. All votes are equal.
In case polling period passes without reaching a two third majority the option with the least votes is removed from the poll and the poll is repeated, when the number of choices is down to two. failure to reach majority shall be considered a sign of discord within the community, the whole community shall then embark on a discussion to resolve the differences.
through the discussion the community may agree to repeat the last poll as is with no changes using the voting approval procedure, if after the repeat two third majority is not reached a simple majoprity is sufficient.
The charter will come up for optional review once every year.
The procedure shall be as follows.
The Charter is expected to evolve slowly over time. The different versions are given names of individuals whom the community feels have contributed meaningfully to the existence of the group specifically and Free/Open Source Software in particular in Egypt. Acting administrators and moderators shall not be considered for naming.
My suggestion for the AUP is to adopt what NewComer proposed and to revisit the AUP again as soon as we get a sizable number of members.
The current poll shows the community is divided by half on allowing profanity, but almost all agree on no personal attacks and hate speech, at the moment we shall adopt the more conservative choice (since it got a majority of sorts) but obviously the topic needs to be reconsidered again.
The Acceptable Use Policy is a simple set of guidelines determining behavior in eglug. The intention is not to restrict, but rather to provide the barest possible protection for members in order to provide a respectable and constructive working environment for the site. The AUP is as follows.
The following kinds of speech will not be allowed on the eglug.org website:
This LUG was founded to promote the ideals of Free/Open Source Software and GNU/Linux. Members are expected to keep the topic of work and discussion in this area as much as they can. It is understood that the line between on-topic and off-topic is sometimes not too clear, and the benefit of the doubt will be given as often as possible. Only clear violations of this rule will be considered a violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.
Blogs are a special area of the eglug.org website, their goal is to foster community and to enable social interaction between members.
The rule about off topic content is relaxed fully when it comes to blogs, blog writers can write about anything they want as long as they don't violate the rest of the rules.
When it comes to religion and philosophy, you have the right to express your believes even if it contradicts other religions as long as it doesn't insult/attack them, there's a very fine line between both.
It is moderators duty to ensure that content published on the eglug.org website does not violate the rules stated above.
Moderators are to avoid editing members posts, they should instead unpublish the post and ask the author to edit the post till it complies with the rules.
Moderators shall not delete content from the website permenantly, posts violating the rules shall be unpublished and moved to a locked location, any member has the right to request monitoring moderation descisions and looking at moderated posts.
A public trail of the moderation descision citing the author of the violating post, the name of the moderator and the reason for moderation shall be provided, failure to do so will be considered violation of the moderators mandate.
Any moderation descision can be revoked through the consensus of 3 moderators.
I did not actualy give this much thought, and I'd like to hear feedback about it.
hmm can we use a better word than class, you know class carries alot of baggage.
the main changes from MadFarmAnimalz suggestions are an automated process for promoting to senior user.
And a concorde voting system for choosing people.
And a very complicated method for choosing administrators, my worry is that administrators have ultimate powers they should be able to trust each other and work together with no tension at all and with minimal disagreements.
Administrators should also trust each others technical abilities and each others embrace of agreed procedures.
which is why I suggest current administrator team must approve candidates.
Since quorum is caclulated in terms of Senior Users and since basic resources don't start oppening up until you're senior user this practicaly means that the community is composed of senior users and above. We cannot have an open and democratic community if entery into the community is tied to acceptance of a certain class of members, this renders the right for gratis membership and member equiality void.
Seniority is just a measure of commitment and activity afterall.
I'm not sure if it should be completly automated though, I think moderators should have the right to bypass the system in order to promote some members (but not the opposite). essentialy to empower those who can contribute alot.
the numbers I chose for the scoring system are arbitirary please consider them as just place holders.
I chose a concorde voting method when selecting people for several reasons.
This document details the process of selecting Administrators, Moderators and Senior Users.
It also covers the procedure for dealing with members who violate their mandates or abuse their positions.
Senior members shall be choosen from among new members in an auotmated fashion.
A score will be kept to measure each members activity in the LUG, any member who reaches a score of 100 points will be automaticaly promoted to senior member.
Only contributions in the in topic areas of the eglug.org website and activities will be scored, moderated/unpublished contributions will not be counted at all.
Moderators are chosen from the pool of senior users.
The Number of moderators shall be 20% the number of senior users and the procedure to choose moderators shall be as follows
A moderator may resign at any point from her duties.
Administrators are chosen from the pool of moderators. An administrator is nothing more than a moderator with additional strictly technical responsibilities which means that technical competence is a prerequisite.
Due to technical details administrators have to function as once entity, there is no place for disagreement at all between administrators.
Number of Administrators shall be 4 or 20% the number of moderators (whichever is larger).
Once a year after reviewing the charter the number of Administrators needed is calculated and new administrators are chosen according to the following procedure:
An administrator may resign at any point, but must stick around until a replacement is voted upon.
In case of administrators or moderators violating their mandate the community may vote on demoting the them.
Violation of mandate represent a breech of social contract, the member is demoted to new user with 0 score.
Only administrators can propose membership revocation.
Membership may only be revoked if a member:
Since both these criteria are subjective, membership revocation must be approved by the community through 27 votes:
Where a user has his/her membership revoked, and where all 27 votes are senior or new user ballots it can be understood that there is a significant disconnect between the administrators/moderators and the community at large.
This document details how resources owned by eglug.org shall be used and what are the rights of the members in relation to these resources.
Ownership here is a social contract not legal ownership, legal ownership would typicaly be to the one who payed for the resource, in case of payment by electronic means as in credit cards legal ownership will be to the owner of the account used to pay. while this in theory may give one person power over the whole community there is no practical means to avoid this problem, trust and peer pressure are the only thing the only guarantees we could have.
At the moment all eglug.org resources are donated by Alaa, MadFarmAnimalz, Uniball, WhirlPool and ezabi, later to avoid concentrating too much power a wider group of members should contribute in paying.
The resources controlled by eglug.org are the eglug.org and eglug.net domains and and hosting space.
The details of how these resources can be used very much depends on the details of the hosting package, this policy shall change everytime the hosting provider or package changes.
As of the time of writing this version (5th of June 2004) the resources can be distributed as:
Administrators are responsible for maintaining and allocating these resources as described in the charter.
Only Administratos hold the passwords to all resources, abuse of these resurces will be considred violation of their mandate.
The community shall work hard to ensure that changes in this policy are for better distribution and more access to members, changes to less resources or more restrictive usage shall only happen when it is extremly nessecary.
In case of running out of resources administrators will investigate if one area or person is using excess amounts of resources, or if some resources are allocated to an unactive area, if no resource waste is found this will b taken to mean the community has grown enough to justify acquiring new resources.
The rest of the resources are to be used by the administrators to server the needs of the community, Administrators are required to utilize these resources to implement any features or ideas the community agrees on.
we should add language to describe a formal process for collecting money for annual payments.
we should also add language to describe a formal process for dealing with running out of resources.
we should also add language to the effect that hosting provider should not be changed except under very extreme conditions to minimize dns instability and the pain of migrating emails boxes and stuff like that.
cheers, Alaa