On 17/05/2008, Mike Godwin mgodwin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thomas Dalton writes:
"Trustees agree that that, during their terms on the Board and for three years thereafter, they shall not, in any communications with the press or other media or any customer, client or supplier of the Foundation, or any of the Foundation's affiliates, or in discussions on community mailing lists, blogs, or other community forums, personally criticize, ridicule or make any statement that personally disparages or is personally derogatory of the Foundation or its affiliates or any of their respective directors, trustees, or senior officers."
That explicitly bans all public criticism.
That is untrue. Note the use of the word "personally" (it appears three times). The idea here is actually to *encourage constructive criticism outside of personal attacks*. The idea here is not to make someone who is selected for the Board the victim of personal attacks from other members of the Board during their term of service and for a limited period thereafter.
You've changed "criticise" to "attack" (and continued to use "attack" in the rest of your email) as if the terms are interchangeable - in my view, they are not. If you consider all (personal) criticism to be an attack, then clearly you're going to have a problem with it. I view criticism as an attempt to improve things. If it's a person that needs to improve, then the criticism will be personal. I think it's just as important to encourage people to make constructive criticism about other people as it is the encourage them to make constructive criticism about anything else (really, I struggle to see how you can criticise anything other than a person or group of people - criticising what they do, rather than them, is just semantics).