this duplicates the above.

This needs a lot of work, it's kinda preachy now

Err... wait. This is a value judgement that isn't necessarily true and that it's worth teasing out a bit of nuance.

Discussing technical topics in public casts a wide net and may attract a wide audience of participants. A wide net of participants cuts in two ways:

• competent and sufficiently qualified people may participate (good)
• unqualified opinions may also participate, and can negatively impact the signal to noise ratio (bad)

It is not uncommon for people to not realize the limitations in their understanding and to participate. One consequence of this phenomena is that qualified opinions will need to either wade through this discussion (which expends precious effort and executive capacity). It is also entirely too common for participation in a discussion to be misconstrued as authority or domain expertise.

I'm not suggesting it is unimportant to invest in teaching people and to grow the community, but it's also important to be mindful of the activation energy of getting someone qualified to participate in community discussions. The results of private discussions should always be made public for the benefit of the community. We have many examples of this where subject matter experts get together in small groups or offline to discuss many different technical details. This offline practice is generally perceived to be helpful and appreciated by participants.

The objection is the word "always." I agree with the rest of the paragraph in that FreeBSD is an open source operating system, however our goal is to ship the best open code available. Given that a number of us are commercially oriented in our thinking and motivations, this also means that we're on the clock with regards to our contributions and need to be efficient in our use of everyone's time. We put process guidelines in place to aid in good and healthy outcomes and to strike a balance between open and fully transparent, and productive and efficient.

Would it be possible to rephrase this in the positive instead? Something like:

<listeitem>
<para>Conduct discussions in public or report the results of discussions to public forums.</para>

<para>&os is a trusted Open Source project because of its emphasis on transparency and disclosure.  Where
reasonable, conducting discussions in public forums is encouraged (notably because there is no effort
required to summarize the outcome for the public).  Where this is not possible, due to subject mater
expertise or timeliness, the results of technical discussions and topics should be made public so the
project's working memory can be enriched through a shared understanding of the outcome from subject
matter experts.  The trade-off of productivity from focused conversations vs the cost of summarizing
the outcome of a discussion is left to the best judgement of the participants.</para>

<para>If you think something should be discussed in public, suggest to the other participants to have the
discussion in public, or to make the summary available of a discussion available so the community at large
may benefit from the rationale that lead up to a decision.  Reminder: it is not acceptable to unilaterally
make a discussion or summary available in a public forum without consent (e.g. &a.developers; or private
correspondence).  In the end, use good judgement to facilitate productive communication practices between
individuals and be mindful of our open source community writ-large (including but not limited to: commercial
users, appliance vendors, open source enthusiasts, students, and service providers).</para>
</listitem>

Does that work for you? If so, can you also chase that updated title elsewhere in this patch?

• Discussed w/ @imp and @allanjude