------ Original Message ------
From: "Benjamin Kerensa via governance" <governance@lists.mozilla.org>
It’s definitely a problematic situation and I think it demonstrates how
Mozilla is drifting more and more from its manifesto and values towards
a more corporate and closed community. Mozilla embraces more closed
practices today than it did just a few years ago.
I think that we need to have a nuanced and probably difficult
conversation about what openness means, and what working in the open
means on the modern internet.
I still believe that an open, participatory Mozilla matters. I still
think that working in the open is core to the identity of the project
and the success of the mission. But I worry that our definition of
openness, and our understanding of the practical realities of working in
the open, was born on an internet that no longer exists.
I can't speak for everyone, but I know that a lot of us got our start
when an internet connection was a novelty and there were lots of real
barriers between the network and the average person. When "working in
the open", for the most part, meant working in front of an audience that
was lucky enough to go to university or college, whose parents could
afford a computer at home, who lived somewhere with broadband or had one
of the relatively few jobs where the company network let port 80 in from
the outside world.
What working in the open _didn't_ mean, though, was doxxing,
cyberstalking, botnets, gamergate, weaponized social media tooling,
carrier-grade targeted-harassment-as-a-service and state-actor
psy-op/disinformation campaigns that roll by like bad weather. But
that's sure as hell part of what working in the open involves now. And I
don't know I could ask a friends and colleague to participate in forums
that have no way to ablate or mitigate any of that, and still think of
myself as being a just and responsible person.
I'm taking about authenticated infrastructure here, which is sort of a
poor proxy for the far more important idea of _accountable_
infrastructure, but you see what I mean.
My sense is that a lot of our discussions about openness are anchored in
the idea of people's freedom to participate, and about the limitations
placed on those freedoms, and I don't think that's enough. We need to
stand up for the idea that people participating in the Mozilla project
deserve to be free _from_ the brand of arbitrary, mechanized harassment
that thrives on unaccountable infrastructure. I mean, how many of us use
adblockers? Would anyone here be willing to turn off our junk mail
filters?
In a sense, I see that as the future of Mozilla's mission, and our
responsibility to the Web; that we're not here merely to defend your
freedom to participate in the Mission, or in the Web, but to break new
ground and mount a positive defense of people's opportunities to
participate. And on the other side of that coin, to aspire not merely to
allow Mozillians freedom from arbitrary harassment, but to even the
possibility of that harassment.
There's a lot of subtlety here, and a lot of careful conversations about
accessibility and tooling that will require a lot of empathy, because a
lot of things that look like quotidian routine to one Mozillian can seem
insanely, unacceptably dangerous to another, and Mozilla belongs to both
of them.
I think we should work in the open. I think we should default to open.
But I think we need to be _really_, _really_ honest with ourselves about
what open means, and what we're asking of people when we use that word.
We're probably going to find that there's not one right answer. But
we're definitely not going to find any answers that matter in the
present day if the only place we're looking is backwards.
- mhoye
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