neveragaindottech / neveragaindottech.github.io Goto Github PK

The Never Again Pledge is not self-describing, and there is no sentence in the text that provides a good (enough) short summary of the pledge and its purpose.

The pledge would be stronger if it had such a summary. It would also make it easier to reference in e.g. awesome lists, or - in my case - from the Programmer's Oath repository.

It seems to me that a pledge like this is the first step toward establishing a standard of ethics within our profession, but to move from "it's nice that some engineers think like this" to "this is how engineers should behave" you need to recognise a set of core values within the trade.

To my mind, the best way to accomplish this is to get Free software projects and companies to publicly state that they only work with engineers who adhere to an ethical standard. In the same way that our conferences are all starting to carry standard codes of conduct for attendance, perhaps it's time to call for a standard code of "do no harm" for the profession in general.

As far as I know, SURJ does good work, but they are an organization explicitly for white people to organize other white people. Let's add some options for everybody to get involved! I'd be happy to help identify local organizations in the USA / coordinate other people doing so. At the very least, I think it should be mentioned that POC can seek out local Black Lives Matter organizations to work with.

For example, I added my name in dc797a3 but it was immediately removed in b6d31e0. (I'm assuming this was not intentional.)

I can't make heads or tails of the commit history because of all the merges, so I initially had some hope that the file was eventually consistent, but this does not appear to be the case.

I find it disturbing that the pledge seems to completely ignore American history, not a single word is lost about the genocide of the native Americans neither is slavery mentioned which while not genocide was the systematic abuse of a race.

It would be nice translating the page, making it accesible to anyone who is interested in the cause.

I'm not familiar with i18n and stuff, so if anybody can add the future I'd like to share translating it to spanish.

http://neveragain.tech/ gives a domain parking page right now :(

Seems like maybe this domain got bought by someone else? Not sure, I'm on mobile so I can't investigate thoroughly.

Heya,

I'm a big fan of this initiative and I'm considering signing. However, while I'm quite active in the software community (in particular with http://pump.io, which uses social data) and plan to work in software in the future, I've never held a formal programming job for longer than two months.

Should I sign? I don't want to dilute the message if I'm not part of the intended audience, especially since the homepage begins with:

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people.

@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@
   <li>We refuse to participate in the creation of
   databases of identifying information
   for the United States government
-  to target individuals based on race, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation or identity.
+  to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.

   <li>We will advocate within our organizations:
     <ul>

If so, should probably also add it to the bullets under "We will advocate within our organizations".

(Originally filed as lizthegrey/signbot#15 , @lizthegrey suggested reposting here)

Please forgive me if this is obvious/redundant/already discussed, I can only see what's on the site.

I think it's really important to collect email addresses so you can follow-up with signatories about what's happening, follow-on actions, etc. The pledge is a great starting point for building a community of tech folks who want to take further action. I would be really sad if this opportunity fell through the cracks.

Of course, there's no current mechanism to store contents other than the public repo, and I imagine many people would not want their email in there, so there'd need some sort of private backend (db, private github repo, even just logging where one could extract later).

Please let me know if this direction would be welcome, etc. Happy to help however I can.

[...] it's worth pointing out that you should probably get everybody who signed the list already to reaffirm their commitment to the amended text or remove their name (similar to the procedure around changing licenses without a CLA).

(That is from #52 (comment))

So, let's make a call on this. Do you leave the pledge as-is, forever more? Or do you figure out how to change it without inciting a backlash from the existing signatories?

I'm in favor of leaving it as is, because I don't want to destroy current momentum. Regrettably, this means that I'm removing my thumbs up on the proposal to add gender identity etc to the pledge. :(

Dear organizers,

Thank you for everything you do. I DM'ed my signature on Dec 14th, but don't see my name on the list. Is there any chance mine will still be added?

Thank you!
Brigitte

There is an excellent Github repository offering an oath to sign for developers: The Programmer's Oath
The signing is based on a commit you make to the repository.

The Never Again Pledge could adopt this signing method as well. The advantage would be that no manual work is required to register all the new entries. The signing method could use an additional publishing script that uses a commit hook and the Github API (and Github Pages) to automatically extract user data (and avatar maybe) and republish the website.

I just created an issue on the Programmer's Oath repo along the same lines (it does not have a published page yet): Widdershin/programmers-oath#126

Having direct PRs is error-prone as more people sign.
People could contribute to a different file, and then you can generate the index.html page periodically with a script so it's always kept alphabetical.

Sorry folks, I'm not a dev or programmer, everything here is greek to me. The email I sent to you bounced (no such gmail address). This issue is extremely important to me, and I'm grateful you started it — please tell me how to add my name.

One of the first bullet points:

to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate...

That doesn't actually require they cease the collection or retention of data that would be completely sufficient to identify chosen target groups, merely "minimize" it which is quite subjective. Why not call for a complete halt of the acquisition of data that could be used to target groups for unethical actions?

The repo links to https://neveragain.tech, but the DNS records point to pages.github.com, and the server doesn't have a certificate valid for neveragain.tech.

Similar to the change proposed in #52, while we're proposing changes to the terms of the pledge:

@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@
 <ul>
   <li>We refuse to participate in the creation of
   databases of identifying information
-   for the United States government
+   for any government, at home or abroad,
   to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.

   <li>We will advocate within our organizations:

This seems especially prudent when you consider that the main cited impetus for this declaration was an American company building such a database for the German government.

The repo seems to be lacking a license. I suggest creating a LICENSE.md file with the appropriate licensing.

The repository description at top is pointing to https://neveragain.tech/, which raises a security warning in browser, it seems that the SSL is not valid, please fix the link to http ( http://neveragain.tech/ )

<li><a href="https://www.codeforamerica.org/join-us/volunteer-with-us/list-of-all-brigades">Code for America Brigades</a>