Put support of human rights into our Vision?

[dwsinger]

I wonder whether a quotation or two from the Universal declaration of human rights might ground our vision here?

Some that appear relevant are:

"without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status"

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

[cwilso]

My personal reaction is that this would make this sound more like a political manifesto, and less like a clear definition of our guiding vision. I think we already have far too many words and concepts here. I'm happy to take a look at a proposal for wording, but I don't see how to insert such a quotation effectively without complexifying the flow of the vision.

(I do, of course, agree with the universal declaration of human rights. :) )

[dwsinger]

Agreed.

But, for example, we could say that we apply "without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status" as making sure that all have equal access to the web.

We could say that our pursuit of privacy is anchored in "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy".

That "receive and impart information and ideas through any media" includes the WWW as a primary medium of expression, and the ability to publish, to speak, as well as the ability to listen, to read, is fundamental.

I'm not strong on this, but it might help blunt criticism from some that we are being parochial, western, or favoring only one of a diverse set of opinions.

i.e. anchoring, deriving, from these universal rights, applying them to our domain.

[avneeshsingh]

+1 @cwilso this tend to make it much more wordy. Using some snippets is ok. I usually find such long political/legal statements difficult to understand in a single read. Of course these are written by masters of English, but to much sophistication of words makes it less understandable for global audience. I hope UNO understands it some day.

[TzviyaSiegman]

+1 to @cwilso. I'll also point out that in CEPC, we were recently asked to expand and reorganize a statement about the types of offensive comments that are not allowed to be much broader. The reason we were asked to expand this is that it appeared to exclude and/or prioritize certain groups. The text now reads:
"Offensive comments related to socio-economic status, sexual orientation, religion, race, physical appearance, neurotype, nationality, mental health, language, indigeneity, immigration status, gender, gender identity and gender expression, caste, body, or age"
Lists like this are taken rather seriously. (and, we need to clean up the diversity sentence that we do have.)

[dwsinger]

Tzviya, I'm not suggesting incorporating that list.

I am wondering whether we need to say that we recognize Universal Human Rights as they apply to our working in building the web for all of humanity, and imply or state that we derive our authority/standing to make these statements of principle from one of the few documents that is almost universally adopted, that Universal Declaration.

It would answer the question "what basis do you have for making these statements of principle?".

However, I am not sure whether we need to appeal to external authority in the document itself, or whether it would be better to note, when we introduce/present it, that our principles are congruent with, and could be seen as deriving from, some of these rights.

[chaals]

I think the best approach to this is to reference the UDHR where relevant, rather than quoting chunks of it.

I agree that the UDHR is a milestone document and an improvement for humanity. Like much of the UN's work, I think one could easily improve on it - except that it is hard to get consensus on the improvements...

[mallory]

I think it is critical to ground this document in human rights. Here are some sources of inspiration for how to do this concretely:

• A new report from OHCHR about standards and HR: A_HRC_53_42_AdvanceEditedVersion.docx
• How ICANN references human rights in its bylaws: ICANN Commitment to Human Rights-210817658-v2.pdf

[chaals]

Some quick conclusions from the OHCHR report @mallory references:

I regularly holds up W3C as an example of the right thing to do. In particular, it mentions

• Horizontal review (seperately it explicitly highlights our accessibility Work)
• Open participation model / Transparency
• The Ethical Web Principles, correctly ascribed to the TAG rather than the organisation as a whole
• Publishing data on diversity
• Making Human Rights a guiding principle for our work

I also think we are learning to do a pretty good job (at least compared to what they think of as our peers) in making our working culture inclusive, something they explicitly call out as problematic.

There are various gaps it identifies that I think apply to us:

• Performing "Human Rights Due Diligence", i.e. formally assessing how our work is going to impact Human Rights
• lack of data on participant diversity in general
• we're not globally representative with paticipation, and while our apparent gender-balance is better than average figures given, it's well worse than humanity's gender balance.
• monitoring the effect of our work on human rights
• working out how to open participation to under-resourced groups (the "Global South" as a clear example)
• getting companies who participate to provide expertise in human rights as part of their participation

[mallory]

Perhaps to the fourth point under recommendations, I think it's worth adding human rights as a value of the org so that under strategic planning and monitoring frameworks this can be actioned and tracked in the long term.

[chaals]

Some initial thoughts on ICANN's approach to Human Rights, as referenced by @mallory above:

Primarily, they seem to take the easiest path possible to checking the boxes. They plan to "respect Human Rights" but explicitly reject any effort to actually enforce them even in the limited scope of their own technical work. They have deferred any assessment of what those rights might be beyond "Internationally Recognised" - which seems to mean means aiming at the lowest bar of international law. They by and large baulked at referencing actual documents that establish what Human Rights means.

This is an easier path to consensus, but to a consensus that has little operational value. In many issues the discussion of our vision has noted that we want it to be of practical use in guiding our work. To achieve that I think we will need to consider what happened in ICANN as a counter-example, and explicitly aim to go further. I recognise this increases the work needed to get to consensus, but think it's extremely useful to do.

[mallory]

Couldn't agree more. ICANN might be the only concrete example of human rights in governance doc for a standards body but w3c should pick up this baton and run it further.

[cwilso]

Retitled as the issue is really specific to human rights. I feel this is mostly in the realm of the TAG's Ethical Web Principles; if we add it here, it would need to go in the vision for the Web, I think.

[chaals]

@cwilso (mildly?) objected to the original proposal

My personal reaction is that this would make this sound more like a political manifesto, and less like a clear definition of our guiding vision.

The vision is a political manifesto. As far as I can tell, our guiding vision is not just about making some technological thing work faster, or with lower consumption of electricity or requiring less bandwidth or fewer lines of code. It is about wanting te technology ecosystem we work on to support various ideas:

• making it difficult to inject misleading information into the middle of an end-to-end communication channel,
• enabling individuals to make choices about the privacy of information about them,
• including people with disabilities in our definition of our community's members,
• working to make sure our platform supports languages and scripts used all over the world.
• ...

I note that this is an evolution of W3C. The organisation people worked with in the 1990s was not the same, and any commitment to many of the goals we now have was more a matter of personal leaning than organisational stance. Many members' real commitment to accessibility was far weaker when i joined the staff as part of WAI than it is today. But if the vision is what we want in the future, not what we did in the past, I think it makes sense to consider this proposal as an important grounding.