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>
