Usage Policies

LiteracyTent is in the process of crafting its usage policies, and invites anyone with an interest to contribute.

The need for a written policy is emerging as issues of censorship came to light on another prominent list server in 2003. In the face of such an emotionally charged concept as censorship, it is tempting to declare "there will never be any form of censorship on LiteracyTent" and leave it at that. However, while that is very much in the spirit of our intentions, we do need to be careful about oversimplifying. For example, there are perspectives from which deleting an obvious spam about mortgage rates could be considered censorship.

Our overwhelming priority is to ensure that free speech thrives on the lists. An equally important priority is making sure the lists are a useful and safe place to communicate. As such, some guidelines / policies need to be in place to ensure that, for example, the lists are never used for "spamming" or violations of copyright or hate speech or similarly unsavory things. How to make clear rules about this that don't violate the free speech values we all share?

We welcome all feedback and help in this matter. In the absence of a written policy, any dispute or issue will be settled by our own judgement. We HAVE (once or twice) deleted spam from lists that were not properly monitored by their owners; luckily, that's been the worst thing we've had to deal with so far.

We can offer the following guidelines for usage as of now, and we will continue to shape and refine these guidelines as we are able to and as we get feedback on them:

• We will never censor any list's traffic as long as the material is on-topic, and we will interpret that very broadly. Advocacy issues, for example, are absolutely fine, and the inevitable political discussion that often accompanies it is fine too - ideally, on lists dedicated to advocacy.
• We will delete archived posts at the request of the original poster. (We did this on one occasion.)
• We will delete archived posts if ordered to by law enforcement, for reasons that we can only imagine (such as: a post with illegal material, like gross copyright violation or other illegal speech (hate speech/child pornography?))
• We will delete any obvious, "slam-dunk" spam that makes it to the archives, if requested - and we will always work hard to ensure as little of it actually REACHES the lists as possible in the first place.
• We will not delete semi-off-topic material that is in a "grey area," like an author pushing his/her own book in a marginally relevant discussion. We leave it to the social climate of the lists to work that sort of thing out.
• We will not hesitate to do anything necessary to protect the security of the server.

The lists have been running without a hitch since 2001, and hopefully we'll never have any difficult decisions to make about them, but it's best to be prepared.

Please send any feedback you have about this page to us at feedback@literacytent.org (or use our Feedback form).

LiteracyTent is a project of Silicon Goblin Technologies.