On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Adam Roach <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> I think it's patently absurd (and likely offensive to those directly >> impacted) to argue that we should require residents of Kosovo to identify >> themselves as living in Serbia because ISO doesn't yet recognize them as >> independent. We can and should trust an individual or group to exercise >> reasonable discretion around additions to the list to reflect the de facto >> reality of the world. The goal is to enable our community to connect more >> effectively and support the mission locally. Being rigid here doesn't >> serve the mission. >> > > But what's the criteria for allowing this inclusion? Mike Connor's > personal opinion? If I requested an entry for "The Republic of Texas," what > would be the grounds for accepting or rejecting it? > As you know I agree with Mike -- to your slippery slope argument, if you can support your claim for Texas with the diplomatic recognition by a significant amount of other independent states, then by all means it would be warranted. The problem here isn't Kosovo per se; it's the precedent. If we accept new > entries, then we need to define formal criteria for what rises to the level > of being acceptable, and what does not -- the only other alternative is to > use a subjective and possibly contentious evaluation for each request. Both > paths lead us to being forced into politically dicey positions in the > future. > > And I actually agree on the definition or reproducible criteria. In this particular case, we could literally pick any reasonable percentage, and be done arguing. You seem to be missing the detail that we don't actually have to solve a territorial dispute here. We only have to answer the question "if I am from Kosovo, am I welcome to call myself a Kosovan as a Mozillian?" That's not an unreasonable request, and it looks like others have solved this problem by assigning them a country code (XK) and moving on. As a reminder, we're not talking about forcing anyone to use said country entry unless they want to. For the sake of productivity, have a draft policy: """ In some of its products, Mozilla displays a list of countries for users to choose from. To best support our international, diverse and multicultural community we determine such country lists as follows: - The basic list follows the names and country codes of the ISO 3166-2 regions and country list - We shorten the name of Taiwan to "Taiwan" (<insert blob about leaving interpretation up to the beholder>) ^^ in fact, we might want to change that to "we shorten some country names to more commonly used variants", which will allow us to call Bolivia Bolivia) - We add a list item and appropriate region code for any other entity diplomatically recognized as independent by at least 25% of UN member countries. <insert blob about not making a political statement but instead acknowledging that we want to give reasonably established groups of people the ability to identify as such when being active in the Mozilla community> """ Fred _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
