The Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency ========================================= The Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency (also known as "The Soviet") is an ancient and prosperous circumlunar colony. It keeps ongoing close relationships with the sister colonies Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic and Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu: gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/ gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/ The colony is organised in a Soviet (council), under the benevolent supervision of The Union. All the members of the colony have equal rights and contribute to the survival and wealth of the colony on a voluntary basis, and according to their skills and inclinations. The Union supervises the activities of the colony, ensuring that all its members have adequate levels of resources to contribute to the survival and wealth of the colony. Each Soviet user has a personal space (called a "cell") where they can keep their possessions and belongings while staying at the colony. The gopher/gemini space of a user is the only stuff in a cell that must be accessible by the entire galaxy. For the rest, any possession kept in a user's cell is inaccessible to other members of the colony by default, unless the user decides otherwise. Principles ========== The colony exists in the form of a pubnix, a public Unix system where users share space and resources, federated with other pubnixes administered by like-minded folks. The focus of The Soviet is on the usage and development of minimalist free software (mainly for command-line environments) and simple network protocols (including gopher, gemini, finger, etc.), and on the publication of miscellaneous material and content created by the colony members. The colony is founded around the concept of "Small Internet": gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~katolaz/phlog/20190205_ecosystem.txt which values quality over quantity and aims at bringing computing, networking, and digitally-mediated relationships back to human-sized levels. The main inspiring principle of The Soviet is collaboration among colony members, with the aim of sustaining the colony, helping other colony members acquiring new knowledge and achieving their goals, further developing the colony, and ultimately improving the quality of staying for all its members. For this reason, The Soviet has no hierarchies or grades: all members are equal, and contribute with humility and dedication to the wealth of the colony, according to their skills, temper, character, and inclinations. All the software, documentation, tutorials, scripts, and tools developed for The Soviet will be maintained in local shared git repos to which all the colony members have write and commit rights by default. This makes all the colony members of The Soviet equally responsible for and committed to the maintenance and the development of the colony as a whole. The users of the Soviet feel themselves empowered by the responsibility of caring for the colony, altogether, as a fellowship. No user of The Soviet would ever act in a manner that could cause damage to The Soviet, or that could harm any other user of The Soviet or of other sister Circumlunar colonies, or that could put in danger the reputation and good name of The Union. Due to the limited amount of resources available, and to ensure that the members of the colony can establish meaningful relationships with other fellow members, the maximum number of colony members is set to 48. To respect the privacy of the members of The Soviet, *none* of the material present on The Soviet is ever backed up, with the only exception of system files. Consequently, each user is responsible for using a backup solution of their choice, if they wish so. Civil Rights ============ All the members of The Soviet are considered equal, irrespective of their gender, age, ethnicity, socio-economic background, political views, nationality, spoken language, religion (or lack thereof). The members of the Soviet are considerate human beings who care for their fellows. Any member of the Soviet can speak their mind freely, and accepts that other members are allowed to do the same. Soviet users have the civil right to ask for their belonging to the colony to be terminated and their cell and all their possessions destroyed. All such requests will be honoured by The Union without further ado. Such requests are taken seriously. The termination of the cell of a colony member is definitive and irreversible. Please consult the FAQ (Q13) Soviet users have the right to ask The Union to provide specific tools or facilities they need for their daily activities and for the survival and development of the colony. The Union will normally honour such requests, unless they go openly against the collaborative and friendly environment of the Soviet. All the material produced by members of The Soviet is published under their own responsibility. The Union reserves the right to remove material that is deemed offensive, violent, derogative, or otherwise illegal or dangerous. The Union reserves the right to suspend a colony member responsible for the production of such material, and/or to terminate their belonging to The Soviet without further ado. The Union reserves the right to terminate the belonging of any user of The Soviet that acts repeatedly and willingly against the inspiring principles of the colony, as detailed above, and in particular of any user that adopts offensive, derogative, aggressive, disrespectful, or otherwise violent or inappropriate behaviours towards the members of the wide circumlunar universe. The Union reserves the right to disable or remove accounts that remain unused and/or inactive for a log amount of time (more than one year), but only if strictly needed due to scarcity of available accounts. Resources ========= All Soviet users have the same level of access to the programs and facilities available within The Soviet, and each of them is assigned a Basic Disk Quota (BDQ). The value of BDQ is identical for all the Soviet users at any given point in time, and it is initially set to 100MB. However, the BDQ value on The Soviet depends on the level of collaboration showed by the Soviet as a whole, in terms of participation of the members to the life of the community, contribution of software and documentation, publication of content, participation to the social life within the broader family of circumlunar colonies, etc. The Union will periodically revise the BDQ value, increasing it for all the Soviet users as deemed necessary, but always on the basis of the observed level of collective contribution to The Soviet. In any case and at any given point in time, all the users on The Soviet will have identical rights and will be assigned an identical amount of BDQ. ........... :The Union: '''''''''''