On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 11:59 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
My issue is that this was presumably discussed for weeks prior to the announcement to the OTRS list, without any community notification. Even a courtesy heads-up ("we're currently re-evaluating whether certain volunteers need to identify") would have been good, especially as it brings forth a lot of questions from the community that Wikimedia apparently had not considered. (This is pretty clearly evident from the discussion on the OTRS mailing list.) When these decisions are issued by fiat and out of the blue, it raises suspicion about why the discussions weren't public or at least why there weren't any notifications that discussions were taking place. Was it intentional? Was it simply an oversight?
I've had off-hand conversations with many fellow agents over the past couple years that were glancing discussions about the privacy policy and OTRS. Many were concerned about applying because of their transparency in ID not to the WMF, but other volunteers. Trust is a valuable thing and it is very hard to build in an online medium. As a subscriber to both otrs-en-l and otrs-admins-l, I can assure you and the community that there was no closed door conversation with a dozen people on a private mailing list responsible. It's the WMF's call, and one that I happen to support.