I agree with Dariusz on this, and have 2 additional thoughts:
1. I'm not sure that Silicon Valley organizations as a whole are more
secretive than many NGOs. Some are famously super secretive - Apple.
Others are not really - Automattic (Wordpress). Some NGOs tend to be
very controlling of messages, and some not so much.
2. The overall point, I think, is that we should make sure that employee
agreements are on the open end of the spectrum. F/L/OSS movements and
organizations tend to be much more open than other organizations. We're
a strongly community-driven movement *about the free sharing of
knowledge* - so our culture means we need to push openness to a point
that most organizations would find bewildering.
--Jimbo
On 2/29/16 7:26 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak wrote:
On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:00 AM, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Do you believe the various non-disclosure
agreements and non-disparagement
clauses that staff have to sign to work at the WMF should be public? Will
you encourage staff to share their content, in the interests of
transparency?
There are different ways to perceive the WMF and different benchmarks to
relate to. If we perceive the WMF as a Silicon Valley, high-tech
organization, that just happens to be organized as an NGO, and is
contemporarily relying on an open collaboration in a community of editors
(until the machines can substitute them), then surely good benchmarks will
be other Silicon Valley organizations, and using the industry standard
non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements make sense.
I believe that we are something else. We are a social movement, and the WMF
is a mission-driven NGO, that has its top competence in supporting the open
knowledge community, and happens to be pretty good at legal and tech
support, too. But tech has a supportive, not leading role. We,
theoretically, could outsource a lot of tech, but we could not outsource a
lot of community work.
Therefore I believe that better benchmarks would be other rights- and
access-oriented NGOs (Amnesty International? Soros Foundation?), F/L/OSS
movement (Apache Foundation? EFF?), and universities (Oxford? Harvard?
Sorbonne?). By understanding these benchmarks, we can build adequate
standards of transparency, and follow suit in legalese. I believe that a
lot of our current tensions stem basically from not formulating the
fundamental vision of who we are and who we want to be.
dj
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