Improving communication, transparency, and adoption

Haskell Foundation
#42

I wouldn’t consider that a good solution. In my blog post on transparency, I called this out to some extent:

Appropriate signal to noise ratio

Burying important action items in a 2 hour video that needs to be watched in full to pick up on the important parts does not fit my definition of transparency. To quote the referenced Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.”

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#43

I agree! I’m not at all suggesting that the minutes not be published.

It seems to me that there is worry that allowing a time for closed-session minutes-editing would somehow give rise to nefarious actions – like unsaying something. While I personally disagree with these fears, I understand why people would worry about this. However, if a video is freely available, then there is a strong disincentive to trying to misrepresent history in the minutes.

My bottom line: the video makes all the information available immediately (but in a time-consuming-to-access format), while the minutes makes all the information easy to digest (but with a small delay in publication).

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#44

Just boosting this post because I’m scheduling it now. Message me if you want to join.

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#45

I think this is the third time in this thread you’ve implied a motive to me that I never said. I said nothing at all like this. I would appreciate if you would respond to what I’ve said, not what you think I may be thinking. I do not claim nefarious actions. I don’t believe such things would happen. I stated my reasons for being opposed to this secret-minutes approach above.

I can’t state my position more clearly than I have, and I can’t have a conversation where someone makes up motivations for what I’m saying. I do not accept “publish the video” as an act of transparency, and I’ve stated why above.

#46

I am probably naive, but: adopt a policy of getting everybody’s agreement on the minutes before ending ?

In my mind, in the FOSS/getting-things-done-in-a-big-online-community context, a meeting that hasn’t confirmed its minutes, is unfinished. Better to design meetings to be more atomic and definite ?

#47

So, I don’t want to get bogged down in this convo longer than we already have, but I’d be in favor of a 24-hour review process and then posting it publicly, immediately. All changes must be made within a day, and we have a deterministic staging area everyone can access. Perhaps staging on Github, with the publication being on the site.

I feel like this is a happy medium. I don’t think the pace of conversation should be such that we wait days plural or weeks to ratify minutes.

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#48

When you say “everyone can access,” do you mean the general public (aka a semi-public publish), or just the working group (aka private)? Having the text available in eg a GitHub PR to the main website would satisfy everyone’s needs I think.

#49

I’m fine with read-only for everyone outside, read-write for the working group. The main point of publishing it to the site, would be that there would be a “blessed” official version, but there’s no reason why people shouldn’t see the history in github. Most people know how to edit a markdown file on github, and we can track historical changes/PR’s easily. It’s a win-win.

#50

I think a 24-hour review period is reasonable compromise.

For whatever it’s worth, I trust everyone on the board will have good intentions and would not intentionally misrepresent someone in the notes. If someone is accidentally misrepresented, I’m sure we can sort that out by talking to each other.

However, I am a bit worried about accidentally leaking confidential details (e.g. ongoing sponsorships with company X that hasn’t been confirmed and company X doesn’t want this public yet) so I think having some review period to double check these things is good.

4 Likes
#51

@snoyberg worries that waiting a full week before releasing the minutes is not doing justice to transparency.

Others worry that releasing the minutes immediately after meetings might run the risk of ascribing claims, thoughts or intentions not completely faithful to participants.

Humble suggestion from an anonymous trying to reconcile them all:

  1. schedule meetings in a way that makes reviewing the minutes part of the time participants plan for, i.e. a 1.30 long meeting should reserve 15 minutes for the minutes right after it’s done.
  2. to alleviate the pain of longer meetings, make sure that every meeting are announced in a way that:
    • summarizes the context from the previous meeting;
    • introduces the context for the upcoming meeting, with goals, objectives, and people responsible clearly identified;
    • provides material for people to do their homework ahead fo the meeting, so that every is on the same page when the meeting comes up.

Then

  1. organize and moderate meetings in a way that minimizes the number of “open questions”, so that most of the meeting around “I assent” / “I dissent, for reasons X, Y, Z”.

Of course, this presupposes that people are going to communicate and ask questions ahead of the meeting. If this presupposition cannot be honoured, the above bullet points can be tweaked to make more open questions enter the meeting proper.

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#52

We had a transparency track meeting on Monday (December 21), the notes are available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mhokEg3M0E8f9i7-c4oEq-aNmATZrYBS_dWD3D5z3iQ/edit?usp=sharing

As a summary: for most of the topics that we’ve been discussing in the thread, the takeaway is “Emily will raise the points at the next biweekly working group call.”

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#53

The document requires a Google account to be read, are there other ways to access it?

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#54

@emilypi is it possible to change the sharing permissions to make that document world-readable?

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#55

Yes, I’ve switched it so that anyone with the link can view and comment

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