On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:00 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Do you believe the various non-disclosure agreements and non-disparagement clauses that staff have to sign to work at the WMF should be public? Will you encourage staff to share their content, in the interests of transparency?
There are different ways to perceive the WMF and different benchmarks to relate to. If we perceive the WMF as a Silicon Valley, high-tech organization, that just happens to be organized as an NGO, and is contemporarily relying on an open collaboration in a community of editors (until the machines can substitute them), then surely good benchmarks will be other Silicon Valley organizations, and using the industry standard non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements make sense.
I believe that we are something else. We are a social movement, and the WMF is a mission-driven NGO, that has its top competence in supporting the open knowledge community, and happens to be pretty good at legal and tech support, too. But tech has a supportive, not leading role. We, theoretically, could outsource a lot of tech, but we could not outsource a lot of community work.
Therefore I believe that better benchmarks would be other rights- and access-oriented NGOs (Amnesty International? Soros Foundation?), F/L/OSS movement (Apache Foundation? EFF?), and universities (Oxford? Harvard? Sorbonne?). By understanding these benchmarks, we can build adequate standards of transparency, and follow suit in legalese. I believe that a lot of our current tensions stem basically from not formulating the fundamental vision of who we are and who we want to be.
dj