process Re: [bestbits] [Meeting Report]: friday meeting with fadi et all

[John Curran]

On Oct 31, 2013, at 12:37 AM, Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy at ciroap.org> wrote:

> Whilst your point is that "discussions will leak anyway", it's also true that people will strategise in closed cc groups anyway, if we don't provide them a closed list.
> 
> So In order to accommodate them, the use of the private list (and potentially other subject-specific closed lists) exists

Freedom of association implies ability of any set of folks to get together and discuss 
ideas, whether in public or private.

There's nothing wrong with that occurring, and you should presume that others are 
doing the same  (I think I've actually lost track of the number of Internet-governance 
related mailing lists that I'm on...  ;-)

It's important to realize what is lost from any closed discussion - specifically, the result 
is not necessarily representative of any particular open community at that point.
(For example, the output of a "design team" in the IETF becomes simply one possible
suggestion to the working group for moving forward; sometimes it can be very helpful 
in an open process to have folks go off and put something down in writing as a first draft;
this doesn't invalidate the openness of the process, so long the more developed result is 
in simply taken on face value as a input to the open process.)

As long as the folks on a closed CS-oriented mailing list remember to come back with
a proposal to the community at large, it's not much different than if it were developed
as a strawman position via a flurry of private emails among interested folks.

(The other alternative, of course, would be to define your community via a set of objective
terms and conditions, thus allowing work in closed lists which are fully available to those 
"in the community", but this would appear somewhat problematic for civil society as many
folks in society having multiple roles at any given moment.)

My thoughts alone - feel free to use/edit/ignore/discard as desired...
/John