Speculating here but I suspect that one problem with any large community with a 
sharp boundary is that seen from the edge the boundaries feel wrong, because my 
circle of trust feels more relevant than the seemingly arbitrary one that the 
large community has defined. So for example anyone who spends a lot of time 
both doing mozilla stuff and "related" stuff will want their contacts in the 
related area to be involved,  whether that's email clients, free software,  
policy, digital literacy,  etc.

Personally rather than focusing on the sharp line between trusted and 
untrusted, I'm focusing on rewarding openness and community participation. E.g. 
How can a problem be solved by being more participatory. Seems to help me.

--david ascher



-------- Original message --------
From: Mike Connor <[email protected]> 
Date:  
To: Majken Connor <[email protected]> 
Cc: [email protected],Fred Wenzel 
<[email protected]>,Gervase Markham <[email protected]> 
Subject: Re: "Mafia" trust group proposal 
 
On 2013-11-04 5:29 PM, Majken Connor wrote:
> In the Thunderbird case, I know other long-time Mozillians who agreed 
> with the leaker. Given our values we will always run a high risk that 
> a core contributor will think something should be public. The solution 
> to this sort of thing is to better communicate what is private and why 
> it is private and when it will be public and have a functional process 
> for objecting when something is raised privately.

I'm not sure anyone knows what the motivations were for the leaker. It 
was going to be public in 72 hours, so it's not like there was much of a 
moral argument against secrecy.  If the argument is that we shouldn't 
share with community ahead of public, I guess I can't really agree with 
that.

> While we're talking about one kind of abuse - betraying the trust - we 
> should also talk about the opposite type of abuse - misusing the 
> trust. When something is shared only with this group it should be 
> carefully justified each time.

I suspect that the more we have to do to justify sharing information 
with Mozillians the less likely it will be that people will share 
outside of employees.  The goal of having a trusted group is to make it 
easier to include larger groups in information sharing.  It would be a 
high-quality problem for us to give advance notice of too many things to 
our trusted community members.

> Reps sign NDAs, maybe we can have some sort of formal agreement in 
> this case as well that touches on the appropriate use of this trusted 
> communication group.

Legal overhead is a pain for commit access, I'd like to avoid that 
unless we intend to share broadly without subsequent public disclosure.  
Given that NDAs are typically constrained to employees only (and 
changing that would be extremely hard with most partners), I can't see 
that being common enough to do any of this.

-- Mike
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