[Foundation-l] Board statement of responsibility

[Thomas Dalton]

On 17/05/2008, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>  Thomas Dalton writes:
>
>  >> "Trustees agree that that, during their terms on the Board and for
>  >> three years thereafter, they shall not, in any communications with
>  >> the
>  >> press or other media or any customer, client or supplier of the
>  >> Foundation, or any of the Foundation's affiliates, or in discussions
>  >> on community mailing lists, blogs, or other community forums,
>  >> personally criticize, ridicule or make any statement that personally
>  >> disparages or is personally derogatory of the Foundation or its
>  >> affiliates or any of their respective directors, trustees, or senior
>  >> officers."
>  >>
>  >> That explicitly bans all public criticism.
>
>
> That is untrue.  Note the use of the word "personally" (it appears
>  three times).  The idea here is actually to *encourage constructive
>  criticism outside of personal attacks*. The idea here is not to make
>  someone who is selected for the Board the victim of personal attacks
>  from other members of the Board during their term of service and for a
>  limited period thereafter.

You've changed "criticise" to "attack" (and continued to use "attack"
in the rest of your email) as if the terms are interchangeable - in my
view, they are not. If you consider all (personal) criticism to be an
attack, then clearly you're going to have a problem with it. I view
criticism as an attempt to improve things. If it's a person that needs
to improve, then the criticism will be personal. I think it's just as
important to encourage people to make constructive criticism about
other people as it is the encourage them to make constructive
criticism about anything else (really, I struggle to see how you can
criticise anything other than a person or group of people -
criticising what they do, rather than them, is just semantics).