I apologize for taking this out of the communications committee thread; however, I think this is an issue which affects all committees and should be discussed separately: How to deal with confidential information? Daniel Mayer has rightly pointed out the risk of balkanization of our communications infrastructure. The current approach -- one wiki and mailing list for a lot of trusted people -- has the clear advantage that we can get input on a variety of issues from a reasonably large group of individuals. Right now, being a member of the internal wiki and internal-l is tied to organizational status: board members and officers of the mother organization and its chapters have access. This is not entirely fair, as being a chapter officer doesn't automatically mean you're doing as much work, or have as much legitimate interest, as someone who does not currently have the required organizational status, and there is no process -- as far as I am aware -- for those who don't have it to gain access. My favored approach would therefore be one which makes a clear distinction between the "core committees" (created through Board resolutions) and the subcommittees (created by the committees themselves). To my knowledge, we have never really defined what a subcommittee is, so here is a hypothetical model: 1) A core committee which chooses its own members, using 75% approval (the steward threshold). If it is considered necessary, these members might also have to be approved by the Board majority or the Executive Committee; I would prefer this not to be the case. All these members have access to the internal wiki and list as they currently exist. Membership status might be re-evaluated regularly. The committee members would be advised to choose only individuals who are already trusted to be granted access to confidential information, rather than those who have yet to earn that trust. In addition, there are the observers/consultants, who can participate in open meetings, but do not have access to confidential information. Ideally, as much as possible should be discussed in open meetings, but how much that can be will vary, of course. Having these non-voting, non-member participants on board ensures that we have a constant pressure for openness, which is good, as it is always easy to become complacent and do things confidentially when you don't have to. 2) A subcommittee focusing on a particular area of interest, e.g. one project ("Wiktionary"), task ("OTRS") or language ("Swedish"). These could have their own membership procedures, i.e. be totally open or more restrictive, with the maximal restrictiveness being the same as the core committee. Being a member of a subcommittee alone would not automatically give you full access to the internal wiki and list. However, one could be a member of both a core committee and a subcommittee. I would imagine that in practice, much of the work will be going on in focused subcommittees. I would also imagine that, due to them being generally more open, they will have less authority to act in the name of the Foundation than the core committees, but that they will be able to propose resolutions to the core committees. So, in this model, members of the core committees would ideally be chosen based on them doing good work in the subcommittees, hence moving more to a meritocratic model of information access than the current one, which is tied to the (rather stagnant) organizational status. Now, each of these subcommittees may have the need for confidential communications, and this is where it gets tricky. Here, I would suggest exploring the use of namespaces on the internal wiki to segregate confidential information relevant only to one subcommittee. For example, an OTRS: namespace could be created on internal.wikimedia.org particularly for the OTRS subcommittee of Communications. This would necessitate changing the software to allow for namespaces to be associated with user groups, and then giving the correct group membership to everyone who is supposed to have access to the information relevant to a subcommittee. Hiding page content is not too hard; it gets a bit more complicated if we want to make sure that people cannot even see page _titles_ outside their given namespace access, as these are currently shown all over the place. Perhaps a gradual implementation would be sufficient. I prefer this approach to creating lots of separate wikis because, for those people who are trusted to see _all_ confidential information, it reduces the need to manually aggregate information from lots of places (balkanization), and enables them to quickly get involved in relevant discussions (synergies). At the same time, it guarantees that people who have not yet gained the trust of a core committee cannot see anything which is not clearly relevant to them. I know solutions involving software changes are always the least popular ;-), but perhaps it is still preferable to ending up with 30 new wikis and mailing lists. What do others think about this model? I hope we can discuss this in some more detail at the open meeting later today. Best, Erik