Sensitive HW project topics (ethics, safety, ...)

[hoijui]

(This came in as a question by Katarzyna Puchała from the NGI Search ethics evaluation)

Think of HW projects allowing to build weapons, otherwise dangerous objects, contraception apparatus, medical tools, containing religious imagery, and so on.
While we do not deem it our responsibility nor mandate to decide what is appropriate and what not, as authors of software infrastructure, it certainly would be diligent to allow users of our software to make such decisions. More specifically, I would se it as optimal if anyone running an indexer would be able to choose which kinds of potentially sensitive topics to exclude. To achieve that, each project needs to be annotated with tags representing touched topics. Though one could also argue that it would be more diligent to additionally also supply the negative of this list: untouched such topics, as it allows for more topics to be added later on, without the project falsely stipulating that it does not touch these topics, even if it does not get updated after the new categories are added.

In short:
If there are no objections. I will regard this issue as a request for implementing two fields in the ontology that may list touched and respectively untouched sensitive topics, out of a predefined list of such topics (i.e. tags).

This can then be used by anyone down the line, be it indexers, front-ends or end-users, to filter as desired.
The project maintainers have the duty to fill-in these fields.

NOTE: Front-ends/Indexers might want to implement additional mechanisms fro flagging projects as inappropriate, independent of this mechanism.