> On 6 Jan 2015, at 14:48, Andrea Pescetti <pesce...@apache.org> wrote: > > On 06/01/2015 Daniel Gruno wrote: >> projects unfortunately have a tendency to use their private lists for >> much more than committer votes and security issues, which I find is bad >> practice. > > If you as a project had a competitor, possibly a proprietary one, would you > discuss marketing strategy in public? Would you expect the same from your > competitor? This is a purely theoretical issue, but some projects might be > facing it. I don't have a clear-cut answer here. Maybe the answer is yes, but > in practice journalists expect to use confidential channels. So > press/marketing strategy might, and I repeat might, be among the discussions > allowed on the private list. Marketing activities instead, as opposed to > strategy, must surely be discussed on public lists. > > Regards, > Andrea.
This is a good question and one that’s been raised repeatedly over the course of open source’s fairly brief lifetime by OpenOffice, Mozilla (as far as I know), and other, less obvious projects. There’s no single, right answer. But Andrae hits a crucial point. It’s the relationship with the journalist that actually matters. But not all journalists want “secrets.” But they do expect interesting news. And they are trained (and their editors demand) “news” that is new, if not otherwise compelling and interesting. But that does not mean that “news” must only concern the product features, etc. It can also be about the community process, about other “interesting” elements. “Interesting” lies, too, as much in the facts as in the narrative connecting them. And these elements can in fact be made public. Actually, they gain for being public, for asserting publicness. louis
