phoebe ayers wrote:
It seems to me that a good-faith interpretation is that not announcing changes right this second was the right thing to do -- since there was so much controversy among OTRS agents the staff may choose to change or modify the original plan, in which case it's not clear to me what would be announced.
In my discussions with people about these recent decisions, some people have tried to pivot the conversation with statements such as "but Wikimedia is allowed to do this" and "the non-public data access policy is determined by staff." I don't disagree.
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?
Nobody is saying anyone was outside their remit to implement these changes (and to an extent, these changes are sensible, in as much as they make the pointless procedure a little less pointless), but the Community Department doesn't seem particularly keen on involving (or even notifying) the community. That's the larger issue, as I see it.
Some of the comments in this thread have read like "oh, but we were going to announce this as soon as we had decided everything privately." That doesn't seem to fit in with Wikimedia's governance model and more often than not, it leads to situations where the announced implementation of decisions like these have to be re-worked and re-released because adequate discussion and thought weren't given the first time. Again, the discussion on the OTRS mailing list is pretty clear evidence of this.
The original announcement did affect only a limited number of volunteers, and there was no implication that it would be extended to admins, etc. Of course, broader discussion of the issue of identification and access to non-private data (and who should have it) in general is great, and if people have thoughts they should weigh in.
People do have thoughts and have tried to weigh in, but they're being chastised for doing so on this list (not by you, to be clear). I don't see how it's fair to contributors to encourage discussion and debate in some posts while condemning open discussion and debate in other posts (referring here primarily to Steven's posts).
MZMcBride