RTOS
These wiki pages are for the work of the Responsible Terms of Service Community Group. Also see the group main page and mailing list archives.
News
- 3 Dec 2015: Group created by folks at IndieWebCamp Hack Day. General sense that we should talk a little more before trying to gather broader participation, but if you've come across this page and strongly share our goals, please join!
Goal
This is straw draft, trying to clearly state our shared interest. Minor editorial improvements welcome. Discussion welcome on mailing list as replies to this message.
Sometimes computer systems are owned and operated by one person/group of people (the "provider") and act on behalf of another person/group of people (the "user"). This includes web hosting providers, cloud storage providers, email providers, and many, many other services. As people increasingly move their lives online, the opportunity increases for providers to act in ways which subtly or unexpectedly harm users or betray their trust.
Some providers are committed to being trustworthy, to being respectful of the autonomy and privacy of the users.
The goal of this Community Group is to give those providers a way to distinguish themselves in the market from the broader class of providers. We plan to do this by producing a standard Terms of Service document that providers can use to show that commitment. For now, we call this document the Respectful Terms of Service (RTOS). In the interest of communicating this concept to a the market, we might use a different term later. (Also, we don't mean to be saying others are not respectful. There is room for reasonable people to disagree about what constitutes this kind of respect.)
The RTOS will serve as a baseline. Providers are free to make additional commitments, as long as they do not reduce the commitment. (Might those go in an SLA?)
We'll start with a document that makes sense in layperson English, then materialize that in appropriate legalese for different legal systems (Creative Commons seems like the model for this).
Inputs
Please help gather inputs, and provide some commentary. If this gets long, we'll move it to another page.
- Sandro's "Certified Pod Providers" suggestion
- A loose set of ideas and bullet points for what an RTOS might cover, written with a specific technology stack in mind
- Creative Commons Licenses
- A model for how to write re-usable licenses
- RTOS/Example Service Providers
- Developed on the list, attempts to categorize service providers so we can understand how what's being developed here applies
- Vendor Relationship Managment
- Some overlap in goals (explain?)
- TOS;DR
- Some overlap in goals (explain?)
Also, some specific vendors: