Forgive my ignorance but what do you mean by
Is @jonah the final say on recommendations? I was under the impression it was a bit more democratic then that but maybe I don’t fully understand the process.
Well, he is the Privacy Guides director and I wanted him to be aware of it, is all. Just pointing it out to consider this during the official evaluation (whenever and however that may be).
1 Like
All PRs are reviewed by a committee of Privacy Guides staff members, of which Jonah is included. However, this is mostly done to ensure accuracy of the content written in the PR.
Ultimately, every single recommendation we make is up to community consensus. You cannot write a PR without the original suggestion topic being approved by a community moderator or staff member. All that depends on the discussion we see.
Edit: For example, let’s say everyone here loves Obscura and votes for its inclusion. Even if a staff member does not like Obscura for personal reasons (heavy emphasis on this being a hypothetical scenario haha), he does not have the power to veto its inclusion if it fits our criteria and there is a real community push for them.
7 Likes
I would hop in here to give this some nuance, the board does have the power to veto things, its just not that a single person can decide that something gets added or removed on their own, regardless of their position in the organization.
7 Likes
Is all of this made clear elsewhere for what the process is officially like and what happens during and for such evaluations? Perhaps I should search harder but I didn’t find anything that outlines it all.
3 Likes
It is something that we could perhaps improve on. There is currently a lot of grey area. The forum and community really give us a lot of external insights, with the voting system letting us poll how popular something is. While we put a very heavy importance on the community consensus, it is mostly up to the team to decide what comes and goes, where more heavy decisons require more votes, but less important things, like fixing typo’s or updating some stats like how many servers a vpn has, require less.
A reason why it has never really been written out is that policies can be gamed, and the team really wants to be able to veto decisions in cases like skiff, where something technically checks all the boxes, but still feels off.
In anycase, I do think it is time that we try to think out a transparent policy were we do clearly lay out the policy for addition and removal, where we still maintain a veto.
8 Likes
Privacy Guides related question:
If you follow the comments from this point onward (mainly the two comments linked below), could you once and for all properly and officially clarify how PG evaluates any product/tool/service for its official recommendation and what the process is like and all that it entails?
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/mullvad-has-partnered-with-obscura-vpn/24860/203
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/mullvad-has-partnered-with-obscura-vpn/24860/212
I bring this up because the thread is active again and people (including me) are wondering for clarity. Thank you.
2 Likes
Our guidance for how changes to the website should be approved by team members are outlined in our documentation:
As far as “evaluating”/reviewing tools the methods to do so are not documented for the reasons @Niek-de-Wilde stated, and of course vary widely depending on what kind of tool we are looking at, but it generally comes down to confirming conformance with the established criteria for the category.
In any case…
Kevin’s statement is correct, but I think what Niek and I want to make clear that “consensus” is not “democracy” and ultimately if we don’t think there is consensus in the community on recommending a certain tool then the team will not recommend that tool even if a majority of people on this forum want it added or it receives many votes. This is a collaborative community, not a competition for majority rule.
8 Likes
Just to clarify, this is true in the reverse as well? What I mean is, there is no difference in how tool removals work, correct?
Thank you for clarifying.
Isn’t this:
equivalent to:
?
Am I not reading or understanding it right to be confused a little here? How do you think of consensus then? Sorry, I don’t follow what appears to be an easy to understand rule/policy/protocol.
Sorry I am currently away but I will leave you with a few past posts I’ve written and then I’ll try to answer more later:
1 Like
Democracy is dissensus. In this context, we refer to democracy with the simple (simplistic) rule of the majority.
Consensus refers to a decision that is near unanimous. In a consensus, all or close to all people having a voice agree.
Let Jonah get back with further clarifications on a more solidified process if PG can make one or atleast to explain it in a more or less step by step process.
1 Like
I guess the summary version is that here at Privacy Guides people don’t need to trust the team to be the experts themselves on every topic that we publish recommendations on, but people are trusting the team to weigh all the discussions we see and make recommendations accordingly. If you don’t trust the team to do that then I think you’ll just have to make your own website because I don’t think the process can be improved that much on our end.
However, in that case I still think this forum and our other resources provide a lot of value to people who are going out and making their own recommendations that differ from our own. In addition to our “recommendations” we facilitate this community to discuss all sorts of things often far outside of what we’ve published information on in a way that’s as neutral as we can, so that other people can still try and judge what the “consensus” is on their own if they disagree with us, instead of having to just listen to what we put out, which I see as the main difference between us and resources (even good ones) from experts or content creators.
The other thing I would note is that while this forum/community has a lot of weight obviously, the team does aim to seek out what we feel is the general consensus from the “privacy community” at large + journalists + field experts + etc. This is another reason an idea that’s super popular here might not be welcomed on the site, but we try to make those notes in the forum threads for people to respond to.
I’ll still post more thoughts on this soon.
3 Likes
This is exactly the reason we should encourage independent blogging. Of course that is for better or for worse, It usually doesn’t cost anything or much to get started (see bearblog for example) and also relatively easy to do (back to the bearblog example, it uses markdown and also supports html so as long as you know either you’re golden)
And more importantly it gives different perspectives and voices than ones given from the likes of say sites like Privacy Guides like Techlore and more like that.
Again the whole independent blogging, I emphasize on encouraging for better or for worse because you can encounter worse or you can encounter better, it is what it is with independence
1 Like
Oh I know, I’m just saying that is how I see things, the recommendations/publications do require some trust in the team versus it being a completely objective rubric for tools to follow.
It’s important because I totally agree with what @anon39279085 just said, which is basically I think dissenting opinions/perspectives is important for a community to have, and I do think people should write their own articles and websites if they want to talk about something we haven’t covered, but I would hope that those people would still find the Privacy Guides forum and the resources we are putting out helpful in that journey.
I think a good recent example of this was The Privacy Dad's review of Ubuntu Touch on a Pixel 3A which covered a topic we don’t really talk about on the site at the moment, but this forum still had a good discussion (because we are not shutting down topics that we don’t personally cover, for example) and I would hope the author would continue to post new articles here and seek the opinions of this community even if the perspective is not aligned with “official recommendations.”
I think another good example of this is the threads on Obscura VPN, which I would hope people (and Obscura themselves) generally find useful even if we have not yet fully worked out what the best way to recommend multi-party VPNs is quite yet.
3 Likes
Removing my comments because they don’t add any value to the conversation.