I agree with Dariusz on this, and have 2 additional thoughts: 1. I'm not sure that Silicon Valley organizations as a whole are more secretive than many NGOs. Some are famously super secretive - Apple. Others are not really - Automattic (Wordpress). Some NGOs tend to be very controlling of messages, and some not so much.
2. The overall point, I think, is that we should make sure that employee agreements are on the open end of the spectrum. F/L/OSS movements and organizations tend to be much more open than other organizations. We're a strongly community-driven movement *about the free sharing of knowledge* - so our culture means we need to push openness to a point that most organizations would find bewildering. --Jimbo On 2/29/16 7:26 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak wrote: > On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:00 AM, Andreas Kolbe <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Do you believe the various non-disclosure agreements and non-disparagement >> clauses that staff have to sign to work at the WMF should be public? Will >> you encourage staff to share their content, in the interests of >> transparency? >> >> > There are different ways to perceive the WMF and different benchmarks to > relate to. If we perceive the WMF as a Silicon Valley, high-tech > organization, that just happens to be organized as an NGO, and is > contemporarily relying on an open collaboration in a community of editors > (until the machines can substitute them), then surely good benchmarks will > be other Silicon Valley organizations, and using the industry standard > non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements make sense. > > I believe that we are something else. We are a social movement, and the WMF > is a mission-driven NGO, that has its top competence in supporting the open > knowledge community, and happens to be pretty good at legal and tech > support, too. But tech has a supportive, not leading role. We, > theoretically, could outsource a lot of tech, but we could not outsource a > lot of community work. > > Therefore I believe that better benchmarks would be other rights- and > access-oriented NGOs (Amnesty International? Soros Foundation?), F/L/OSS > movement (Apache Foundation? EFF?), and universities (Oxford? Harvard? > Sorbonne?). By understanding these benchmarks, we can build adequate > standards of transparency, and follow suit in legalese. I believe that a > lot of our current tensions stem basically from not formulating the > fundamental vision of who we are and who we want to be. > > dj > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
