I don’t assume anything bad or shady happening in the channel like some others might do. It’s more about the process of how it was formed, the greater community informed about it and the reasoning provided to support the creation of the channel.

If they were to build some private “pay for play” group, I think the post wouldn’t be there in the first place 🙂 So it’s good to see some level of transparency here, even though I personally think the level wasn’t just enough.

From the Community Team’s experience, a private channel to discuss sensitive matters has proven valuable and has replaced multiple DM groups we had previously – which helps with making more things visible to the whole deputy team. So if that’s the case, I really understand where this experiment is coming from.

I think it also comes down to leading by example. Project leadership should be extra cautious about doing something that affects (or can be assumed to do so) the transparency of the project. If leadership does not follow project principles, why would other contributors do that?

Having public discussions is slow. It’s sometimes annoying. Sometimes you need to reconsider the proposal and reasoning. But it also relieves the stress of misunderstandings. The formation of the private Community Deputy channel did take two lengthy discussion and four months before the private channel was actually created.