This is to continue discussion from Require Open Source for Password Managers thread where we end up talking about consensus, is polling the way to go etc.
I propose we continue this discussion here.
I feel that you could still reply to that forum post though? Unless youâre trying to take a general approach here.
Polls can be good to measure the popular vote but we might not always listen to that.
The advice on privacy guides is based on expertise. Not on general public opinion.
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I guess perhaps because of anonymity but you are are quite mistaken on this part. In fact many of us have degrees and certifications in these fields.
But do you trust a vendor to asses the experts on hire or do you very the whole team before buying a product?
Nah i am trying to make a comparision. I dont think a company or organisation needs to expose all their employees to the public to gain trust.
People in the PG team are selected because of their proven contributions in the community. So there is not much difference there from the way I see it.
I believe that PG recommendations are quite a proven set of trustworthy track record. But that will always remain to the public to trust us or not. That we cannot change, neither I think we have to. We already some reputation in the field. I personally donât think there is a need to change something.
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Well it is up to you/and other readers to trust us as those public experts (or not). I dont mind you challenging it either, we always are open for that debate.
I also think you underestimate the influence the community already has. Basically all things come from the community and are collectively assesed with the best input and questions from everyone out here. (So i used to). However in the end we curate what is out there not on public opinion because that is arbitrary but on facts assesed by expertise of the team (always in conversation with the community).
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I personally like the decision making process here and would be reluctant to change it. I just donât trust the PG community enough to give it more decision making influence then it already has. I think outside of maybe a handful of users (I donât include myself in that group), at any given time, most users are not evidenced based, and tend to only care about the criteria set forward for any given category when it suits them. Threads are typically filled with feeling based arguments, logical fallacies, and/or outright incorrect (intentionally or not) statements.
I tend to agree with this statement. I think making a massive change to the process when the process has a good track record is an attempt to solve a problem that does not exist.
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I will re-share my thoughts regarding polling:
âŚand âconsensusâ:
Now I will reply to points you made in the other post here to continue it:
It makes perfect sense. It only doesnât make sense if you are still thinking of Privacy Guides as a direct democracy, which again it certainly is not.
What I am saying is that what we are doing is considering how each and every decision we make will affect the many thousands of people who read our resources every day. This is precisely why we will occasionally make decisions that do not align with the very small minority of people here on the forum who are actively participating, because exactly like you said the community here on the forum alone is not the only audience we are writing for.
I am not suggesting we rope all of these people into a discussion, no.
You will have to elaborate on this, because this is the very first time I am hearing an objection to how we currently present Mull browser.
We reached a very solid compromise that most people could agree on with the âwarningsâ we added associated with the listing, which is exactly what achieving consensus is. The example youâre bringing up is probably one of the best examples in my mind of Privacy Guides working exactly as intended.
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Iâm unsure if I agree with your assessment here necessarily, but it doesnât really matter for the point Iâll make either way.
It would be more apt to call this a research project, and we are researchers rather than experts. Research is of course a very well-defined field, and what we are doing as a team is creating new knowledge to share with others, rather than sharing our existing knowledge as an âexpertâ would.
I think that one of Privacy Guidesâ biggest strengths is that we are solidly connected and have the tools and resources required to research all these topics effectively, and that we have a team of people who are quite skilled at research in the first place.
This is the difference between the âresearchâ shared by Privacy Guides and the âexpert opinionsâ presented by other popular âprivacy creatorsâ who consider themselves to be experts. In many cases of âprivacy expertsâ the real problem is that they donât have the research skills to present information outside their own bubble of expertise.
Privacy Guides also tends to be a very conservative organization, and I think situations like these are why some changes appear to take a very long time to complete for no discernible reason to outside observers.
I think it is wrong for @ph00lt0 to (probably unintentionally) imply that we base our recommendations on individual expertise, but certainly synthesizing the input from a variety of experts is something we frequently do.
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That was surely not what I was saying. There is a lot of expertise in the team but indeed it is never an individual who makes a final recommendation.
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I looked back on the thread, and it wasnât that controversial, after all. Either there was a previous thread about something related - like relaxing the criteria- that was more heated, or I was just personally very against it and thought everyone also was.
I must say that this decision was a good one. Mull is a very good browser, and it is in many ways better than Brave, like it supports passkeys well, has extension support, and has better sync (IMO) than Brave.
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I mean, how can you speak for people who donât make their voice heard ?
My beef with your argument was that you seemed to say that because only a minority weighted-in, that this made their voice a minority. This seem to be a justification for saying someone knows what those people want, while in fact, you do NOT (and neither do I) know what they want.
Another point, a forum is not a good way to make decisions.
If anything, it often reinforce oneâs belief.
I think we would benefit to use tools like pol.is.
Polis is a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning.
This has been used successfully for reaching decisions in real-world scenario, like with vTaiwan.
Also, I should note that reaching consensus, is not always the best way to go. (See here on how to take consensus-based decisions).
It is a lengthy process which requires multiple steps, and which has AFAIK never been practiced here.
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