Hello everyone,
Discussion topic
I want to gather your thoughts on shared/“brand” accounts on the Privacy Guides forum.
While I can’t stress enough how fantastic it is that privacy-focused organizations are reaching out to the community here, as the forum grows and this occurs more often, I worry about the effect this will have on community discussions.
This forum was always meant to be a community of people interested in privacy, and not overly commercialized or support-focused. Frankly, brand accounts on any platform tend to be less clear and authentic because they have to speak for the entire brand, all the time.
They also can suggest a larger presence in the community than actually exists. I see community members try to ping or reach out to some of these accounts on occasion, but it isn’t very clear whether they are monitored.
Proposal
We have a good number of developers and other project members participating in many discussions with individual accounts. Our existing verification process ensures these people are who they claim to be, and very clearly marks them as affiliates of different projects:
Very often we see much higher quality contributions from teams which participate in this manner, because there is an understanding that they are not always speaking on behalf of their employers, and there is more direct accountability for their words. In other words, the community is better able to judge the qualifications and “powers” of the person posting, whereas a brand account could be hiding anyone from the CEO to a Tier 1 support staff that isn’t able to impact the company no matter what is asked of them.
Therefore, a new rule I might propose would be a one person = one account requirement, so that all company representatives are here in the manner above, rather than behind shared accounts.
(For particularly privacy-conscious organizations and individuals, I would point out that this is definitely not a real-name policy or anything, and “pen names” could be permissible as long as each account is individually operated.)
If we think this is a good idea, we would kindly/humbly reach out to groups who already have shared accounts on the forum, and ask them to become individual community members instead, and we would verify their team’s accounts like above if they choose to do so.
Potential Downsides
I see the downsides of this being mainly for brands themselves, not the rest of the community, but that doesn’t make them less valid. Mainly, this change could make it more challenging for organizations to participate. Shared accounts of course have more consistency in messaging, and can be manned by multiple people to ensure conversations aren’t missed.
The reduced visibility of an organization’s branding might also discourage those organizations from participating at all, which could diminish valuable contributions from these teams.
The solution proposed above of course will add more complexity for brands looking to contribute to discussions here, but I am currently leaning towards it being worth the change, because we tend to see teams with individual accounts be more active in discussions and more accountable.
I am particularly interested in the opinions of existing stakeholders here, like @Tuta_Official, @Proton_Team, @ForwardEmail, etc.: Whether this change to our community rules would make it unreasonable for you to contribute to discussions about your products/organizations here in the future?
Additional functionality
For companies/organizations committed to a larger presence in our community, and who require more structured representation here than our current verification system allows, we could potentially be open to company-affiliate badges (see @sgp’s profile for a live example of what this would look like with MAGIC Grants) to make it even clearer about whether their presence is official & company related or not, like so:
This feature could also allow shared DM mailboxes and group pings (i.e. anyone could ping or message @company to notify all team members) if the company/org was really interested in having a very formal structure here, but that feature wouldn’t be required of them of course.
Ultimately we want to encourage as many privacy-related organizations to join here as possible, because their contributions to discussions greatly benefit everybody involved, but we also need to make sure that we uphold our own mission and values, and direct communication with the teams behind products will always be better for community discussion than communications with entities abstracted away behind brands.
I do anticipate that some brands will simply choose to not participate at all if this happens, which will be a bummer in the short-term, but as a long-term strategy I think this will improve the forum immensely. Personally I think this is likely the best path forwards, and I’m interested in the rest of yours’ thoughts as well 
