On Sun, 5 Apr 2026 at 08:46, Dave Cridland <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 5 Mar 2026 at 18:11, Dave Cridland <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I'm not absolutely against this, and could be persuaded, but my concern is >> that members have voting rights, and ultimately control the Foundation. >> >> We are, and should remain, an open and entirely transparent organisation. >> >> I don't know of another standards organisation that allows for voting rights >> under pseudonyms. >> >> IETF publishes full names for IESG, IAB, Nomcom, etc, for example. >> >> I can be persuaded to change my mind, of course, and I do understand (and >> worry) that some people may have legitimate reasons why they do not want >> their name publicly listed. > > Nobody seems to have an argument counter to this, or at least, nobody has > raised anything.
That's probably because I got distracted halfway through writing it and it got stuck in my drafts folder. The basis was that, as you note, we don't verify anyone's names are what they say they are. To me it seems that either this matters, or it doesn't. If it matters, we should be performing some level of verification beyond "yep, that looks like a real name to me" (which is absurd for hopefully obvious reasons). If the names don't matter, we should be prepared to publish whatever name someone supplies. It seems to me that other organizations either don't publish names or don't verify them. We seem to want to reject pseudonyms *and* insist on publishing, and I don't see many examples of this in other organizations (just for membership, not for holding elected roles). > The closest seems to be that we don't check real names anyway, so someone > could use an entirely fake identity. I'm not overwhelmingly convinced by > "it's potentially bad now, so let's lean into that" as an argument. > From an organisational perspective, I still think that having the names of > people empowered to control the Foundation be public is part of being an open > and transparent organisation. I would like to agree, but what we have now are almost arbitrary text strings, they only passed the "LGTM" test, and there is zero guarantee that they are anybody's real names. And even if all the names listed today are in fact legitimate... if somebody wanted to be malicious, obviously they would surely be the ones to game the system with fake (but convincing) names. I think the rules only hurt the honest people. I understand the value that people *think* listing "real" names brings, but due to the lack of verification, I believe this value is merely an illusion and these arguments have no logical foundation. Finally, there are so many examples of successful member-driven organizations that do not publish the details of their ordinary members. It clearly can work. I just wanted to respond to the suggestion that there are no counter-arguments. If everyone is happy with the status quo despite the arguments presented here, I'm not going to argue further. Otherwise, I suggest we pick either 1) accepting pseudonyms or 2) hiding member names (always|when requested). Regards, Matthew
