Open Discussion?

The Mozilla Manifesto says:

8. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.

People occasionally assert that a particular major decision made at Mozilla was, or was not, made in a sufficiently transparent, community-based and participatory manner. Defining “transparent, community-based and participatory” is complicated, but here’s a good rule of thumb I would like to assert:

If there’s a Mozilla public discussion forum covering the particular area of the project in question, and nothing was said in it, then that major decision has not been made in an transparent, community-based and participatory manner.

For all their flaws (and our efforts to fix them) the discussion forums (a.k.a. “mailing lists”, “newsgroups”) are the primary public, asynchronous, multiple participant, archived communications mechanism for the Mozilla project, and they are where communities gather around areas of interest. Those are the people who need to hear about what’s going on.

If there is no forum for your area of the project, and there is a part of our community which needs a home, ask for one to be created (pick “Standard Discussion Forum”).

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