It seems to me that the journalist practice of wanting confidential access serves the interests of the journalist, not the project. I would simply deny such requests and/or encourage the journalist to put questions on a public list.
With regard to "competitors," I just remind myself that forking is a feature and that community before code means not acting like a competitor. One should not accept the so-called competitor's terms of debate, no matter how much individuals might see and even prefer "competition." Personally, I would not have any conversation with a journalist that was not recorded or, better yet, wasn't in a written exchange, such as via email. But that is me personally. But denial of confidential access should probably be a strong PMC position. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Andrea Pescetti [mailto:pesce...@apache.org] Sent: Tuesday, January 6, 2015 11:48 To: dev@community.apache.org Subject: Re: A maturity model for Apache projects 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.
