On 2/29/16 7:00 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
A few days ago, Oliver Keyes said[1] here on this list that, even though he had already quit his job, he was scared to share with people the content of the non-disclosure agreement he had to sign as a WMF staff member.
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?
I don't know, as I haven't seen those. If there is a standard boilerplate non-disclosure agrement that all staff sign (normal practice) then I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be made public. I also don't see much reason *for* it to be made public, if it's just the usual sort of thing. I don't see that it matters much either way, to be frank.
In some cases, employees will be bound by specific nondisclosure agreements with partner organizations that bind the Foundation. I would not say that publishing the details of those makes sense. Let me give a purely hypothetical example for the sake of clarity.
Suppose we negotiate with a vendor to buy some hardware and manage to get a great discount because the vendor loves Wikipedia. The vendor might say, hey, look, I can only give this discount to Wikipedia, and it would hurt my competitive position in the marketplace if the price I'm giving you were well known. So they'll say, hey, I can give you this discount, but only under a nondisclosure agreement.
I wouldn't support publishing that nondisclosure agreement.