Re: Some comments

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Almer S. Tigelaar" <almer1@dds.nl> writes: 
> I am wondering what you mean hear with 'confidential'? I get the nasty
> feeling this is more or less a loophole to make decisions behind other
> people's back or something which is not a good thing.
> Maybe someone could give a concrete example and more clearly define 
> 'certain occasions'?
> 

Some examples:

 - Eazel wants to talk to the board about how to approach the 
   GNOME community, and wants help from the board planning their
   GNOME announcement

 - A GNOME member wants to discuss some personal issue (I can't think 
   of what this might be, but it seems possible)

The fact is that if the board can't do anything confidential, then
people who want confidentiality will approach someone other than the
board, probably companies for the most part. There is no way to force
confidential information to be revealed; if the board can't keep
secrets then it simply won't find out any secrets.

Allowing the board to keep things confidential means that a
democratically elected body can represent the community in sensitive
discussions. Right now, confidential issues are just handled by the
small group a company happens to talk to. For example, Eazel talked to
Red Hat and Miguel mostly.

To define "certain occasions," ultimately the board is going to have
to use its best judgment here; so we need to elect people we trust to
have good judgment.

Anyway, I think a board that can keep secrets ends up being much more
democratic, because then the board can know about secrets, and that
lets democratically-elected persons deal with secrets, instead of
people at companies.

Havoc