On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:38 AM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 3:06 PM, Jimmy Wales <jimmywa...@wikia-inc.com> > wrote: > >> On 2/29/16 7:00 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote: >> > A few days ago, Oliver Keyes said[1] here on this list that, even though >> he >> > had already quit his job, he was scared to share with people the content >> of >> > the non-disclosure agreement he had to sign as a WMF staff member. >> > >> > 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? >> >> I don't know, as I haven't seen those. If there is a standard >> boilerplate non-disclosure agrement that all staff sign (normal >> practice) then I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be made public. >> I also don't see much reason *for* it to be made public, if it's just >> the usual sort of thing. I don't see that it matters much either way, >> to be frank. >> > > > Well, there's been enough interest in this over the years to justify it. It > would quell speculation. > > As you are currently in SF, it should be fairly easy to arrange for someone > to post the standard, boilerplate non-disclosure > agreements/non-disparagement clauses that (1) staff and (2) management have > to sign here on this list, or lets us know where we can find them on the > WMF website. > > If universities and commercial companies are able to do that, so should WMF. >
It's worth noting that publishing the current standard != publishing what people have signed. The document has varied a lot over the years (I helped tweak/copyedit some of the volunteer NDAs a few years back, hence paying attention to this). I would really love if whatever the latest version of the NDA is, everyone re-signed, to avoid ambiguity here. At the moment what people are prohibited from doing varies depending on when they joined the organisation. The current staff NDA, interestingly, I can't find on the Office wiki. The volunteer NDA is there, but even I don't know what the current staff one is (I may just be missing a link, or having a bad search experience, which given the team I work for would be a weird kind of funny). The version I signed, way back when, both prohibited me from disclosing confidential information and contained a non-defamation clause around the organisation and its legal agents. Now, I have no idea if this is still in the staff contract and NDA. I sincerely hope it's not. But I hope people recognise that a clause prohibiting staffers from saying a class of things about C-levels in public, when most staff are not lawyers, is by definition going to have a chilling effect on conversations about organisational direction and staff performance. Sure, that class of things may in fact be totally unacceptable and actually not things that we'd say...but how the heck are we to know that? So I support the idea, at a minimum, of publishing the current NDA and contract form, and I would really like it if legal could bring all staff NDAs up to spec. One thing that was discussed early on that would also be fantastic; the whistleblower policy currently protects people for reporting *legal* violations to the *government*, and nothing else. Given that California is an at-will state, broadening this would be...I was going to say nice but really I mean "essential to any transparent organisation that wants processes resistant to one bad apple". _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
