# Right to Participate

> "We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us"
> - "A Schoolman's Guide to Marshal McLuhan", John Culkin

The Right to Participate gives customers the right to participate in shaping the
infrastructure to suit their needs.

- Commitment to right to participate
- Right is strong language becaue it's aspirational, not because it's clear-cut and guaranteed or universal thing
- Should be balanced against keeping our infrastructure stable, etc
- WHAT RIGHT DOES THIS ACTUALLY GIVE PEOPLE?
- Right ot get involved?
- What ways does this restrict us?
- Do we offer guarantees on CR response?
- No, I think this really helps us focus on self-serve
- Who *exactly* gets this right?
- Yeah, end user isn't always the customer.

- Doesn't remove our obligation t

## Questions to answer

- *Who* gets this right?
- End users
- Organization paying us
- I think this is the right answer.
- Organizations paying us should be able to dedicate their own resources to
changing their environments
- What ways does this constrain us?
- What guarantees are we making?
- Why do we care?
- *How* do you participate? What power do you actually have?

## Reading

https://2i2c.org/right-to-replicate/

"We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us" from
https://webspace.royalroads.ca/llefevre/wp-content/uploads/sites/258/2017/08/A-Schoolmans-Guide-to-Marshall-McLuhan-1.pdf

---

### Notes: CZI DAY 3 Do-a-thon

Participants: Sarah Gibson, Stéfan van der Walt, Alexander (Sasha) Wait Zaranek, Yuvi Panda, Chris Holdgraf, Arielle Bennett, Nikki Stevens

- What rights are we actually giving people?
- Access to decision making
- Needs to still happen in the open
- What needs to be in place to give people the right to participate?
- Procedural governance
- Distinction: Right to Participate doesn't guarantee decision-making power or your desired outcome, only access to the process
- https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/ exists
- Define mechanisms for how different levels of folks can participate.
- Positive and negative rights! Opportunity to participate.
- Examples:
- Negative right: Right to be free from harm.
- Positive right: Right to marry the person you love.
- From Alabama Policy: A negative right restrains other persons or governments by limiting their actions toward or against the right holder. Positive rights provide the right holder with a claim against another person or the state for some good, service, or treatment.
- A single group isn't in a position to be explicit and prescriptive about "what is means to be participatory": very community-specific.
- Being thoughtful and transparent about why certain decisions are made in a certain way. E.g., why does this subset of people have decision rights? What are the notes from this part of a meeting redacted?
- What, if any, are the preconditions for participation? Information? Confidentiality? Transparency?
- Transparency about "where is the room where discussion happens" is a first step. Just knowing it exists is a precursor to participation.

### Potential Outline

- What is the thing we are giving?
- Why giving you this thing matters to us
- Why giving you this thing should matter to you
- How community-owned/-developed infrastructure differs to the alternatives
- What is the method to deliver the thing we are giving?
- Limitations
- Examples!
- Spectrum of which criteria examples meet - non-judgmentally!
- Wikimedia?
- SciPy proceedings
- Papers come in as PRs, uses rst, docutils, etc to build PDFs
- Preview server that builds it and provides previews
- Runs in a different place (last time on heroku)
- Didn't have DOIs in the beginning, was added later.
- Every year new committee shows up and reworks the software.
- https://github.com/scipy-conference/scipy_proceedings and https://github.com/scipy-conference/procbuild
- Something about how people who aren't currently running the infrastructure - can they repurpose it for their own use without needing permission?
- Can I come in as an external person, and work within the *existing community* to do what it is that I want? And not just 'fork' it.
- What is the scope? At what point is there a fork.
- How do you deal with data?
- You can't participate if you can't replicate
- https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/
- MyBinder.org
- Fediverse instances (Mastodon)
- (things that will not meet our criteria) arxiv, medarxiv, etc

### ~~Criteria~~ Factors? Aspects?

- Source code must be available
- Community process to contribute/feedback
- (Right to Replicate) Import your data into your own instance

1. Replicability of infrastructure
2. Decision making process itself is public

- What is the goal?
- Be the group that defines the spectrum of options / considerations that others use to decide how to get to where they want to be re: participatory dynamics.
- The goal is not to define a point on the spectrum, but to define the spectrum and what factors put you in different parts of that spectrum.
- Offer a *menu* of services

- Hosted services vs. technology creation / development.
- A hosted service implies there's a person running the service and a person using the service, they're two different people.

- What are the archetypes
- Archetypes can?cannot? be defined outside of the context of their implementation or a specific service
- You should define archetypes and pathways to change between them
- Is this too big / or work duplicated by others?
- Map archetypes by impact, not identity?
- Typical SaS
- Users
- People that pay the bills
- That's about it.
- What other kinds of archetypes could exist
- Thinking about wikipedia:
- editor
- moderator

Mountain of Engagement: https://medium.com/@abbycabs/creating-pathways-that-invest-in-new-maintainers-8ffb52e09681
- Make a specific one of this for hosted services

Find some way to use this figure. 

Figure out what the scope of this would be. Hosted services only?