<quote name="Brian Wolff" date="2014-02-16" time="18:00:29 -0400">
On Feb 16, 2014 2:04 PM, "Jon Robson" jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
Brad since you work for the for the foundation and seem to have a lot of expertise in this area and seem to have been one of the more vocal supporters of free fonts have you reached out to your work colleagues over video conferencing or similar to understand the problems being hit and helped them work through them? Email doesn't seem to have been an
effective
method of communication in this situation as you have pointed out. Maybe you can help with documenting these issues and helping people like
yourself
understand the problems and why this change was reverted?
I've seen setiment like this (discuss in person, in hangout, or otherwise privately) pop up recently (e.g on [1]). I think attitudes like that are a real problem. Supposedly we are an open community. People should be entirely prepared to explain their reasoning for doing anything on a public mailing list no matter if the request comes from a wmf staffer like Brad, or if it comes from somebody you have never heard of before. In fact i would argue that the criteria and results of evaluations should be public on the wiki from the get go, without anyone even asking for it.
See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is "If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen."
The team I most recently heard champion that rule was the Mobile Team.
Greg