----- "Gordon Joly" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> All prospective and current Directors of the Company should be > asked to > >> reveal Wikipedia and related identities (e.g. Commons) . And > perhaps all > >> others (e.g. Twitter). It should be made part of the fabric of the > >> Company, which should be open and accountable. > My suggestion is to make it a condition of becoming a Director of the > > Company that you would reveal all identities online. Both Wikimedia > related and others. > > Open and accountable. That's the mantra.
Not often writing on this list (though usually reading it) I have to interject here. To *demand* that a candidate details all their WM-related identities/activities is, as I see it, a completely valid requirement as it is directly and intimately related to their possible Chapter-related responsibilities and public accountability. To *demand* that they additional detail *all* their other online (and offline?) identities is not so. We may not have a rigorously defined-in-law right to privacy in this country but I believe it would be wrong to make this a *requirement*. By all means someone might wish to release some additional, ie non-WM, information about their online persona(s) but it would be intrusive, not to say an invitation to spammers and stalkers, to have to make additional information public. Every individual is entitled to keep their private life exactly that, and where such online persona(s) are exist and are attributable to that private life I do not believe voters or other WM-related people have any right to know about them when they would not have any impact upon their ability to perform the tasks they are seeing. To give a few examples what about where someone suffers from depression so has an online identity which they use to seek mutual support from others? Where they are GBLT but would lose their employment or family if it were to become public so use an additional persona online? Where they have a blogging identity which 'whistleblows' on a business they are associated with (eg police, ambulance, etc) where the same could happen? There are many other use cases for online anonymity too which are completely valid and would not impact on their ability to work for WMUK or the WM projects generally. We should not be forcing such capable individuals away; restricting candidacy to solely those who can make others believe they are 'squeaky clean' does a disservice to all the possible candidates, and to the electorate too. Alison Wheeler _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
