Recommended Guidelines and Good Practices
Forum Guidelines
All submissions, opinions, queries are welcome in the context of a joint effort to understand peer to peer dynamics and to work in favour of a society, civilization and economy which moves in a direction of the creation of more commons and more peer to peer dynamics based on the free association of individuals to create social goods that are fairly and sustainability available to all human beings.
As with any community we expect all participants including Community, Members and Core Members to be civil and to support of a culture of mutual respect.
Hate speech or discrimination based on gender, race or religion are not tolerated on our forums.
We strongly discourage personal attacks and encourage critical and constructive dialogue about facts and ideas; the systematic use of slander and defamation has no place in our forums. Similarly we do not appreciate trolling or flame wars on our forums. See our #tips for healthy debate
We are proud to say that the culture on our forums is welcoming and good spirited. In the rare case of violation of the above terms, participants and members should privately alert a forum administrator or core member as they are responsible for dealing with any issues that arise.
Administrators and Core Members will aim to deal with conflict in a discrete and private manor for all parties involved.
Persons who have broken the terms will be made aware of their behavior and given fair warning of 24 hours to reflect on their actions and to make an effort to resolve the conflict for example by retracting statements. As a last resort it is at the discretion of administrators to ban participants from our forums.
At the end of the day we want people to feel welcome and comfortable when using our forums. The P2P Foundation is committed to providing appropriate means for all participants to address grievances.
Tips for Healthy Debate
Understanding Arguments and Fallacies
An argument as a matter of dialogue or discourse is a different matter than the general understanding of argument in society. The argument as defined in philosophy is a statement of premises such as beliefs and true statements, followed by a conclusion. The intention is to achieve a reasonable understanding where the statements are true, and thus the conclusion is true, as follows. (see informal and formal fallacies) Premises are previously true conclusions, and therefore, once an accepted conclusion is drawn from an argument, then that conclusion might become a premise for a new round of argument.
[Arguments and Inferences (Stanford Encyclopedia of Encyclopedia)|http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement3.html]
Fallacies
We also recommend that contributors be aware of the major fallacies, such as to minimize poor arguments, and also to preserve the integrity of conversation and basic respect within a group of contributors. An informal fallacy is a case of an error in premises leading to a faulty conclusion.. A formal fallacy is one where the structure of the argument is correct, as given above in the entry above, but the overall validity of the argument.
[Fallacies (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)|http://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/]