On 21 June 2010 22:25, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:
If you don't allow for private discussion and post-mortems within a group of people, then the likelyhood of effective management and feedback decreases. This is not because the Wikimania team is being secretive, but because talking only amongst yourselves that know each other best gives a place to air honest feedback in a way that would not happen if that feeback between the team was forced to be public. Furthermore, there is sensitive information about things like sponsors, finances, relationships between people that simply don't need to be made public as it would cause more harm than good. Every chapter has a private executive channel, and even the Wikimedia movement has an internal mailing list - none of these imply that the rest of the community is "external" but simply that some things are best kept private. Furthermore, you can't actually force people to talk in public, all you do is drive it underground turning what is a legitimate internal discusison into a cabal.
The discussion can happen in private, but the results need to be public or there is really no point. The people discussing it will probably never run a Wikimania again, so they don't really need to know what did and didn't work. Anything that needs to be confidential can be redacted from the public version and the un-redacted version only shared with people that specifically need to know (teams organising future Wikimanias, and maybe those bidding to organise them).