Community principles help guide and inform our collaborative work by providing a framework in which we are working to acheive our goals as a community. This forum thread is a place to discuss the Farm Hack Community Principles and make any changes or additions.
Community Principles (working):
1. Farm Hack is a community to support user generated content and knowledge exchange.
2. We build tools that support sustainable farming and sustainable farmers.
3. We create a culture of collaboration, striving to identify shared values and engage in open exchange.
4. We exist to support our users, and as an organization, we seek to discern from these users our web-development and organizational objectives. This makes us a content-driven (craigslist/wikipedia/hackaday) and community powered platform.
5. Our commitment to farmer-driven and community-driven design helps us to evaluate and respond to press, funder, corporate and other external requests.
6. As a horizontal volunteer-driven effort, we use agile and adaptive development approaches, leadership is shared within the core group. Leaders serve goals defined by the community.
7. Users self-define their interaction and level of involvement. Farm Hack makes tools to facilitate exchange. The goal is to reduce the need for online-time by optimizing Farm Hack site efficiency, connecting users with needed knowledge and relationships.
8. Users are contacted by subscription and control their own experience at their own pace. Farm Hack protects these subscriptions from abuse.
9. If you were looking at a stone wall, Farm Hack would be the mortar between the stones.
10. It is a primary objective that no one organization or individual dominates Farm Hack or is seen as "running farm hack" - but that Farm Hack is a process of collected best management practices for open source R&D rather than a product.
11. Farm Hack will only use and promote open-source software. Closed-source (proprietary) software can be referenced, but not promoted or used. This is to further the culture of collaboration, sustainability, and protection.