Editing Talk:Meeting Notes 2014 05 20

Whoops!  I should have waited a week to introduce the Proposal, so I could make sure it was well understood.

Reprinted:  

''Members should not be forced to identify themselves on the public wiki. NB has a paper Member folder for a good reason. The Secretary's primary job is to maintain the accuracy of the Member List; public (i.e. extra-Noisebridge) identification must not be required for the Secretary to do this job. Relevant consensus item passed at Meeting_Notes_2013_11_12 and begins with "It shall not a secret..."'' 


Just as stated here, the sole purpose of this proposal is a reversal of the requirement to place a "wiki token" (i.e. a Category tag) on one's User page as a means of ratifying your Membership.

Other means of self-identifying that are not readily available by the public wiki would be available after this Consensus item has passed.  Having a member list in GitHub was not part of this proposal at all.  We can continue having a private GitHub list.

I saw in the Meeting Notes that people talked about the requirement that member lists be public.  What do you think people did before web pages were cheap as dirt?  A Secretary kept a paper list of members and turned it over when asked.  There has never been a requirement by any government organization for member lists to be accessible by web page, GitHub, telegraph, or fax machine.

However, the biggest reason why we should not require Members to self-identify on the wiki is that many quality Members will refuse to do it anyway  (military truism: '''never give an order you don't expect to be followed''').  And I think we are pushing away valuable members of the community by pushing an anti-anonymity agenda.

Again, this proposal doesn't touch future means of identifying Members.  It simply prohibits using "Member" tokens on the wiki as a means of judging who is or isn't a member.  

Most of the other discussion at this Meeting was sort of just speculation about what this proposal meant, which is unfortunate.  I'll do a better job of introducing proposals in the future.