Our Principles

Principles describe how we live our values. Each principle helps inform specific actions we might take in order to be the sort of organisation we want. Our principles are liable to change more often than our values, because we might find they aren’t helping us achieve the thing we value and thus they need tweaking.

Local First

We have the radical aspiration that our systems should work even in the absence of global Internet infrastructure. This means that while we may use cloud services, we intend them to be backups and caches, with our primary systems all being physically within Merri-bek.

Eat Our Own Dogfood

We use own own systems to run our organisation.

Open Ecosystems

We value open-source software, but more than that, we prefer open standards that allow software to freely connect with each other, allow people to easily leave, and allow people to control their experience of using the software.

No Amazon

Amazon Web Services is the biggest player in cloud hosting, and yet Amazon is the poster child for extracting massive wealth while providing inhuman labour conditions.

Learning over Efficiency

We learn and teach each other the skills needed to build and run our systems, rather than outsourcing to others. We document what we do in a way that is friendly, clear and accessible.

Move Slow, Don’t Break Things

We take small and slow steps, and we get each thing right. We try hard not to expose the communities that we support to confusion and breakages.

Fun

The Internet used to be fun. We allow in a little chaos, in order to leave room for joyful tinkering by our volunteers.

Pay The Rent

When we take in money, 10% (of gross) goes to support local Wurundjeri initiatives, of their choice not ours.

Race to Zero Carbon

We move rapidly to hosting entirely off renewable energy. We are transparent and accountable about our carbon impacts, and we don’t rely on offsetting, we actually eliminate emissions.

Nazis are for punching, not platforming

While we value diverse viewpoints and disagreement, we aren’t free-speech absolutists. There’s a difference between someone on the Internet saying something we find weird or gross, versus someone saying hateful, violent or threatening things that undermine the right of another person or group to exist, live their life and be happy. We will not tolerate hateful, violent or threatening speech on our platforms.