[Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission

[Thomas Dalton]

On 23 April 2012 11:06, Thomas Goldammer <thogol at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Sorry if someone gets the impression of a black box, but as we are
> investigating privacy violations, we have to be very careful which
> information to share and we prefer to share as little as possible.

Transparency and privacy are not mutually exclusive. Obviously, the
actual content of complaints is usually going to be confidential, but
that doesn't preclude the process being transparent.

You can clearly document the process that you follow. You can publish
metrics like those Lodewijk suggested (and actual numbers, not just
guesses). It would be nice to have a page on meta that says how many
cases are currently at each point in the process and is kept
up-to-date.

The ombudsmen commission has always felt to me to be the most
cabalistic of all the committees and groups we have. A lot of people
don't know it even exists or what it really does. All I tend to hear
about it is when people are complaining that their emails have gone
into the black box, never to be seen again.

Just because it deals with confidential information doesn't mean that
it shouldn't be held to the same standards of transparency as every
other part of our movement.