Well, Jimmy Wales has said here in this discussion that he is "continuing to push for more disclosure and more openness."
Maybe he'll be so kind as to tell you now that you can publish that NDA here on this list without fear of repercussions. I think we all agree that kind of fear should have no place in the WMF.
Andreas
On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:22 PM, Oliver Keyes ironholds@gmail.com wrote:
Anthony has hit the nail on the head here with "could be used to punish or intimidate staff"; the reason I, at least, am uncomfortable talking about the internal details here (beyond the obvious PR elements for the Foundation) is that there's a lot of ongoing fear about repercussions. A couple of years ago this wouldn't have been the case.
(This also indirectly answers the "can we see your NDA?" question. I don't know. And hell, I'm this scared having *already quit*.)
More guidance, and public guidance at that, would be deeply appreciated. Within the Discovery Analytics team we've gone out of our way to write up pretty all-encompassing guidelines specifically for data (which I look forward to being able to publish pretty soon - we just got clearance to do so). It would be nice to have more firm guidance on what we should do with transparency around other kinds of information. It would, of course, be even nicer if we could rebuild trust, since that's the source of a lot of the fear.
On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 6:40 AM, Anthony Cole ahcoleecu@gmail.com wrote:
It's not just NDAs that constrain you, staff. The WMF code of conduct https://m.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Code_of_conduct_policy (that applies to staff and trustees) reads,
"People acting on the Foundation’s behalf must respect and maintain the confidentiality of sensitive information they have gained due to their association with the Foundation. This may include personal information about community members or members of the general public, and/or information about the internal workings of the Foundation or its partners or suppliers."
"Information about the internal workings of the Foundation" is extremely broad and vague, and could be used to punish or intimidate staff who talk openly about anything. Perhaps you could add "some" ("some information about the internal workings of the Foundation") and leave it to the individual NDAs to specify what "some" means. Or perhaps you could just
be
specific in the code of conduct.
Anthony Cole
On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 6:51 PM, James Alexander <
jalexander@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 11:17 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Something that I would like to understand is why so much WMF
information
is
cloaked under NDAs. It seems to me that this is philosophically at
odds
with the values of the community, makes for poor governance, and
provides
cover for opportunities for mischief. I hope that recent events will
prompt
WMF to rethink its habits and assumptions in the realms of
transparency,
openness, and values alignment.
Pine
While on a base level I agree with you I feel its important to add some caveats to that. I think a good portion of this is actually everyone needing a better understanding about what 'is' expected to be private
(and
preferably why) from Management on down. I think a lot of what people
are
calling "under the NDA" may not be :).
I also think it's important to consider the categories of private data/information too, however, because i fear we (both the staff and the community) use "under NDA" as a very broad and note always accurate description. The way I see it there is:
- Private WMF Data or information that is most definetly covered by
the
NDA: examples include most donor data, attorney-client privileged information, information that is legally protected, information we protect via official public policy etc. 2. Information and notes that really don't need to be private: This
is
the stuff we're talking about releasing. 3. Inter personal/team discussions and similar.
[sorry, this turned out tldr, apologies. TLDR: Careful demanding
sharing of
internal team discussions]
- I actually think is really important because it is not what we think
of
when we think of private information (and, honestly, probably isn't
under
the NDA usually) but can be very important to be kept privately even if
the
end result of the discussion should be made public etc.. This is
especially
true to allow open conversations between staff members. Not only do they need to feel comfortable bringing up crazy idea A (which some are now
and
could probably be done more with culture change, possible on both the community and WMF sides) but they need to feel comfortable saying that crazy idea A is crazy and bad for reasons X,Y and Z.
Lodewijk made my main point well in the thread about Lawrence Lessig: People get very uncomfortable talking about others in public. If Staff member B is breaking apart Staff member A's proposal there is a good
chance
at least one of them is going to be feeling very uncomfortable about it. That discomfort often gets much bigger the more people who see what's happening either because they feel more shame (to pick just one of the emotions you can feel in that type of situation) or because they feel
like
they're doing more shaming then they want to do. That expanded
discomfort
can make them significantly less likely to do any number of things we
don't
want: get more defensive/less willing to change, be less wiling to
propose
those bold ideas that could be really great (or not), be less willing to speak out against the bad ideas etc.
The other reason is another one that I imagine we're all familiar with
on
wiki: The more people who pile on in one direction (even if it's only
2-3
frequently) (and in my experience the more public that discussion) the
less
likely people are going to be to oppose what the direction those initial commentators/voters/blah went. Suddenly people feel like they need to defend their opinion much more then they would otherwise or that they
could
be faced with angry opposition. These concerns are certainly possible on internal teams and mailing lists (the WMF Staff list is somewhat famous
for
people being afraid to pile on after a lot of people went the other way
and
I know some, including me, are trying to change that) but they become
more
and more of a concern the wider that audience becomes and publishing
those
discussions is a VERY wide audience.
I think that publishing the Discovery Team meeting with lila recently
was a
right and proper move but I also think it was likely an exception to the rule. Seeing people disagree so strongly and publicly with one of their regular colleagues could very well scare away those colleagues and we
don't
want that.
James Alexander Manager Trust & Safety Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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