When Mozilla went public, the first item on their list of "design principles" was:
"External development counts more than convenience or ease-of-habit for internal-to-Netscape developers. The Netscape X-heads, for example, have moved all of their mail usage except for I'm-out-sick-today and any truly-proprietary messages to the mozilla.unix newsgroup. Likewise with NGLayout hackers and the mozilla.layout group. So it shall be for all development." http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-26-Oct-1998.html I thought we achieved broad consensus a few weeks ago that this principle should be adopted by OLPC, and it was indeed heartening to see more engagement on the devel@ lists and a shift away from private ad-hoc mailing lists. We created a list of 'truly-proprietary' messages, and occasionally even successfully moved conversations to devel@ when the topic strayed away from the proprietary and confidential on that list. I also thought I was successful in convincing management of the pressing need for a community liason, to help ensure that our openness was persistent, and to take personal responsibility for prodding people to use appropriate public fora. I was away in Europe for almost two weeks, and while I've been gone I'm sad to say it seems OLPC has been backsliding. On the "truly proprietary" list I have received messages about OFW2 status, even though it was made public at a press-invited event back in May, on our public mailing lists by our CEO himself (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-May/005752.html), and on sites such as OLPCNews. I've also received many many other messages that don't pass any sort of "confidentiality" bar. Part of the problem, of course, is (as I raised earlier), without a community liason with authority, no one can definitely say what is safe to disclose and what is not, so people are erring on the side of caution and forgetting their prime directive of transparency. Further, many meetings and discussions that used to happen on public IRC channels, so as to better include our many non-local contractors and employees, not to mention interested members of the community, have reverted to face-to-face meetings. "Expediency" is the rationale given -- which of course is exactly the rationale rejected by the principle as stated above. Often transcription or call-in access is offered as a poor substitute to equal access for the community and external developers. Perhaps transparency is not actually a goal of OLPC. But if it is, OLPC has stopped making progress towards this goal. I am wondering if it is appropriate that I unsubscribe from the "truly proprietary" group and refuse to take part in face-to-face meetings, to encourage the sort of openness OLPC claims to desire. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel