The last set of posts are focusing heavily on how to solve the political problem and ignoring the use case of the Reps portal. Adam pointed out " If you want to search for users in a specific country, for example, you have to deal with issues around misspellings, alternate alphabets, full versus short form country names, inclusion of articles, different transliterations, etc. The goal of ISO country codes was to eliminate this variability," and this is exactly the point of having location information on the Reps portal. People need to be able to find Reps near them, or in a particular region.
I don't see how saying "we are going to use some sort of official list of country codes" is a political statement, and certainly doesn't compare to "we are going to actively choose which countries we recognize. By actively choosing which countries we recognize it is much harder to deny support for those political movements. However if we are using a 3rd party list where we haven't made individual choices, we could still say that we support those political movements and hope that they have success in being recognized by the 3rd party (which I doubt we'd do anyway). It would be interesting to consider the option of including any and all country codes and allowing the user to choose. That would also allow Mozilla to say that it is the individual who is making the political statement. In the case of the Reps portal as well, it may be useful information, depending on how high tensions are in a region it might be best to allow people to choose someone in Kosovo who identifies with the same country as themselves. Though I think the cons here would outweigh the pros. Reps could then be targeted for their political affiliations, by each other (hopefully this is unlikely!) or by outsiders. On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Gervase Markham <[email protected]> wrote: > On 13/05/15 15:31, Adam Roach wrote: > > Sure, and the other people who have hit this problem have deferred to > > organizations who have expertise in the area. In the same way as the > > United Nations could not reasonably offer an informed opinion on best > > practices for multithreaded process synchronization, Mozilla does not > > have any reasonable basis to make the kinds of determinations that > > you're claiming we should. > > You persist in claiming that my solution results in us making claims > about what is a country. It does not. In almost every case, people who > deny a particular named area is a country will accept that it is a > region. So if we put it in a field labelled "country or region" everyone > is happy; some people can believe it's a country, some people can > believe it's a region, and we don't have to specify which we are saying > it is. > > > In any case, it seems that we both agree that having a list of > > ISO-identified country codes combined with an option to simply not > > select a value is an adequate solution, which would seem to make the > > rest of the discussion academic. > > That would also work, if not selecting a value was acceptable to the > site maintainers. > > Gerv > > > _______________________________________________ > governance mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance > _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
