All members agree to abide by the following ethical standards. Failure to do so is grounds for a Member Removal Proposal and/or restorative justice process. Ethics are both personal commitments to specific behavioral and cultural patterns within the network as well as design ethics for systems and project outcomes.
- [[#Personal Ethics]]
- [[#System Design Ethics]]
# Personal Ethics
Personal ethics refer to behavioral and cultural patterns of members. Members are encouraged to regularly engage in open and heart-felt self-and-peer reflection on their ethical practice.
#### Good faith collaboration
- **Strong Adherence:** Inquiring others how your project interfaces with theirs
- **Weak Adherence:** Offering to include others in your project
- **Strong Violation:** Demanding a member conform to your approach
- Weak Violation: Subtly manipulating collaborators
#### Honesty
- **Strong Adherence:** Up front disclosure of all relevant information
- **Weak Adherence:** Partial disclosure of information when requested
- **Strong Violation:** Hiding relevant information
- **Weak Violation:** Misrepresenting or manipulating information for personal interest
#### Feedback and accountability
- **Strong Adherence:** Inquiring the impact of your actions, asking others what you could have done better
- **Weak Adherence:** Reluctantly agreeing to hear feedback from others
- **Strong Violation:** Reacting angrily to feedback when shared
- **Weak Violation:** Avoiding feedback and accountability
#### Efficacy over ego
- **Strong Adherence:** Shelving all or part of a project if another member is providing the same function with better results or more efficiently
- **Weak Adherence:** Merging efforts for the same desired outcome
- **Strong Violation:** Pushing a less effective or less developed project to maintain control
- **Weak Violation:** Running identical projects in parallel to maintain control
#### Inclusion & Listening
- **Strong Adherence:** Actively engaging a wide range of members to seek their perspective
- **Weak Adherence:** Remaining open to others adding their perspective
- **Strong Violation:** Excluding competent members because of differences of perspective
- **Weak Violation:** Hiding a project from some members
# System Design Ethics
System design ethics refers to the ethical considerations for the practice of civic innovation. Members are encouraged to regularly engage in open and heart-felt self-and-peer reflection on their systemic design ethics.
#### Resilience
- **Strong Adherence:** Designing fractally with redundancies of key functions at all scales
- **Weak Adherence:** Designing partial redundancy at some scales
- **Strong Violation:** Designing systems that are dependent on large centralized functions
- **Weak Violation:** Designing systems that partially rely on some centralized functions
#### Vitality
- **Strong Adherence:** Designing holistically for all levels of human and ecological well-being through regenerative feedback loops
- **Weak Adherence:** Designing for some levels of human and ecological well-being
- **Strong Violation:** Designing extractive processes that deplete human or ecological well-being
- **Weak Violation:** Disregarding some aspects of well-being in process design
#### Choice
- **Strong Adherence:** Designing inclusive mechanisms of self-authorship and community ownership at the protocol level
- **Weak Adherence:** Providing informed consent when direct self-authorship and community ownership is not included
- **Strong Violation:** Designing walled gardens with no exit and no self-authorship or ownership
- **Weak Violation:** Designing open source plugins for a walled garden ecosystem