About ABRI

What is The Australian Bill of Rights Initiative?

The Australian Bill of Rights Initiative (ABRI) is a web-based, free-content bill of rights, written collaboratively by volunteers. By means of online collaboration, the project aims to:

• stimulate a dialogue on the creation of an Australian bill of rights;
• facilitate broad participation in the collaborative process of drafting a bill of rights;
• raise public awareness of the value of advancing and protecting fundamental human rights; and
• provide a forum for determining an ongoing course of action for the adoption of an Australian bill of rights.

Who is ABRI

At the point of ABRI's formation, we are made up of lawyers, barristers,academics, artists and futurists. It is envisaged that as the project progresses, the contributing participants will grow and diversify across the various fields of the social spectrum.

In principle, ABRI welcomes all to participate in discussions in relation to human rights and the creation of an Australian bill of rights, as well as to participate in the actual collaborative creation of a federal Australian bill of rights.

The TWiki collaboration platform tracks and caches all pages once they have been saved, attributing authorship to the edits made from version to version. Identification of contribution authorship stimulates community building through fostering trust and familiarity, as well as encouraging and enabling discussion in respect of the content contributed. In addition, no page content can ever be lost once saved, and pages can be 'rolled back' to an original version. For more information on the principles ABRI has employed in the creation of this project, please see ABRIProtocols.

If you are interested in who has contributed to this site, please see the ParticipantList? .

Values

ABRI's values are generally represented in its organisational structure. By providing open access to contribute to the creation of an Australian bill of rights, 'we support and encourage participatory governance and promote awareness of human rights issues'.

With regards to individual involvement, through the use of web-based technologies "we support informal self management as a means to allow participants to contribute as much or as little, and when and how they like". We understand and appreciate that the participants maintain busy schedules and the process of contributing and involvement to this project is continually being refined to make it as quick and easy as possible.

ABRI's approach to the acceptance of new contributors is simple: '''ABRI recognises that every human has a valid contribution to make on the subject of human rights'''. However, if a new contributor's interests &/or objectives differ significantly from ABRI's, we will be most willing to direct them to the means by which they can start their own wiki collaboration.

Evident in its overall organisation, "ABRI believes that collaboration provides a means towards the development of an inclusive, equitable future". Taking its inspiration from the open source and free software movements online, ABRI believes that quality information may be generated as a result of large-scale collaboration. This notion stands in contrast to (but does not reject) the idea of quality information only being the result of a single mind's integrity.

In order to provide participants with the information they may require to contribute in their individual capacities, "ABRI supports transparency of process and open disclosure of communication and information". In the future, ABRI will provide publicly accessible archives of the discussions which take place via its email discussion lists. †

Another value represented in ABRI's organisational structure, is that of the 'open system'. "ABRI views human rights as an ever evolving subject requiring constant attention and development." As our way of life changes with time and increasing awareness, so do the ways in which human rights need to be protected and developed. It is ABRI's goal to develop a means to generate a bill of rights that can change with the demands of the culture that generates it. At any given point, a 'snapshot' may be taken of the bill by clicking Master Document View in the Bill Of Rights web, represented in a print version and subjected to judicial editing as required for legal assessment.

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† (For more information on the ideas of 'informal self management', 'immediate acceptance of new contributors' and 'open disclosure', please see the article: Managing Information Quality in Virtual Communities of Practice by Andreas Neus, pages 4 & 5. This article was originally presented as part of The 6th International Conference on Information Quality at MIT and is available at http://opensource.mit.edu/)