On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 3:06 PM, Jimmy Wales jimmywales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
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.
Well, there's been enough interest in this over the years to justify it. It would quell speculation.
As you are currently in SF, it should be fairly easy to arrange for someone to post the standard, boilerplate non-disclosure agreements/non-disparagement clauses that (1) staff and (2) management have to sign here on this list, or lets us know where we can find them on the WMF website.
If universities and commercial companies are able to do that, so should WMF.
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.
Sure. Me neither.
Andreas