I am also for open by default, but I think that we also need to take human
behaviour into account, not just the technical possibilities. I think given
how Mozilla operates, publicly (not just for Mozillians) available logs
would be akin to streaming every conference room over vidyo by default.
This is possible and this would be incredibly transparent, and people miss
a *lot* of decision making and discussion from not being in the same room.
But, would people remember to change their behaviour to remember that they
constantly have an audience? Is this the kind of behaviour change we want?
Would people just move to a different venue to be able to talk before an
idea is ready for an audience? Would we just need to revisit this
conversation to demand logging of the new venues? Also, what do we do about
people who want a "safe place" to discuss something before sharing with an
audience? Do we push them out of the community?

You shouldn't have to follow an IRC channel to stay up to date on decision
making. I like the idea of being able to link to a relevant IRC
conversation in a bug or in an announcement to make this easier. I agree
that volunteers need to put some effort into participation, but spending
hours watching meeting videos and sifting through logs is a net waste of
time compared to taking good notes and announcing decisions. Having to sift
through logs to find the needle in a haystack is still a form of
obfuscation. How does someone know there is even something in the logs they
want to see? How do they figure out where that information is?

Again, I agree that project channels should be logged, I'm just saying that
practically speaking, I don't know that this actually does a lot to make us
effectively open. I don't think it helps people who aren't already
following those channels to better follow the team or get more involved,
and I think we need to think through the side-effects of a logged and
public policy for somewhere that people see as contained and informal
(whether consciously or sub-consciously).

Regarding the bots, you can set a bot to only send a message to the same
nick once, so I think that actually can be done properly. I was also on a
bug ages ago to update the message you get when you connect to the server
for the first time. This would also be a place to mention a privacy policy
(if that wasn't already the plan).



On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 2:46 PM, Mike Hoye <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 2015-01-27 2:17 PM, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:
>
>> I'm having a really hard time parsing most of the conversation here. It
>> seems that most people are under the false impression that IRC
>> conversations are private by default.  That is not the case.
>>
>
> That a user's expectations are based on inaccurate information doesn't
> change how the user feels when those expectations are violated.
>
> My only point is that this is a privacy-related thing, so while in this
> case the tech is easy - as you note, that work is already done! - let's get
> the user-perception part right too.
>
>
> - mhoye
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>
_______________________________________________
governance mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

Reply via email to