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).
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.
5 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.
5 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.
2 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.
4 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.
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.
6 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