[Foundation-l] Criticism of employees (was VPAT)

[MZMcBride]

Dan Rosenthal wrote:
> I'm not referring to a single incident. I'm referring to a broader trend;
> there have been recent incidents on other mailing lists as well, including
> ones where staff subscriptions are more prevalent than foundation-l (although
> I'm going to disagree with you and suggest more than just a handful of WMF
> employees and contractors are subscribed to this list. It's still the "main"
> public list we have.)
> 
> You have a perfectly valid point about transparency, but that's not the issue
> here. The issue is the unwarranted criticism that is starting to become
> commonplace. That IS foundation-l (or more specifically, certain posters)
> fault.

I'm going to assume this was just phrased poorly because you seem to be
saying that "criticism is happening in a lot of places, so clearly there's
just too much criticism." That seems rather backward and wrong. If there's
more and more criticism in various forums, I'd venture to guess that there
are actual underlying problems, not just people who are being too critical.
It's possible that it's a mix of both, but the fact that you're seeing more
and more people (some of whom I imagine you respect and trust) make
complaints or criticisms indicates to me that there is likely a fundamental
issue with the actors' actions.

If criticism is unduly harsh in your opinion, you should say so to the
people doing the criticizing as it happens (privately or publicly). Nobody's
perfect; sometimes people are too harsh. And sometimes text is just mis-read
or mis-phrased. That's the nature of text-based communication, or any
communication, really.

MZMcBride