4.5. Take extra extra extra care to have all discussions in the open

Principle needed
Implementation needed
Example needed

4.5.1. Radically visible meetings at all times

Any private interactions, from the hallway to email/irc to phone calls, are a risk to the project. At the minimum, you must be mindful of reporting back the results of direct conversation.
However, this isn't really good enough. A summary of a meeting never shows the reasoned discussion, effectively cutting the community out of the decision making process.
Implementation needed
There is a reason mailing lists and open chat networks are the baseline for all communication in successful open source projects.
Example needed

4.5.2. No decision point is too small to pre-announce to a mailing list

While we can grow trust in the community about technical or other decisions, there are common problem circumstances we can avoid:
  • The corporate sponsor and staff are always more suspect, so need to take extra care to share the decision making process
  • We cannot guess what is important to contributors, nor why. Presuming they don't care about a decision is a bad idea.
Implementation needed
The method is to take all decisions to the open forums, until people start complaining that a particular class of decisions can happen in another way/place. This is called, "Building trust by proof through annoying transparency."
Example needed

4.5.3. How to let a mailing list run itself

A mailing list is the core of any active community that gets things done. It is the equivalent to having everyone in the same office all the time. The functionality has not been duplicated, replicated, or replaced with any other technology in more than twenty years. News service is arguably better, but mailing lists are ubiquitous.
It's not hard to run a mailing list, in fact the best ones really run themselves. In order to get it to that state:
  1. Everything must be discussed on the list.
  2. If you break rule 1, you must make sure that whatever the discussion was, the details and results are published on the list
    • This happens often, so it is incumbent that decisions come back to the list from IRC, phone calls, f2f meetings