[ODFPlugtest] Chatham House Rule

[robert_weir at us.ibm.com]

plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org wrote on 11/19/2009 06:50:15 PM:
 
> Personally, I think these rules create a complex situation of that 
requires
> people to keep a duality in place about what can be said and what not 
and
> can you infer things I cannot say from things I am allowed to say. Also,
> since many bugtrackers are public, Chatham rules would stop bugs from 
being
> allowed to be reported.
> 
> Being cooperative is an important goal and 'Chatham rules' serves as a
> synonym for 'be constructive' and I appreciate it as such. Strictly
> following the rules seems impractical though. In my mind, what is more
> important is that the standardization process allows a low threshold for
> new implementors.
> 


That is a fair point.  One of the primary goals of the plugfest is to 
identify interoperability bugs between implementations.  I'd fully expect 
that Microsoft or IBM or Google would take what bugs it found and report 
them to their development teams.  So at IBM we might enter a bug that says 
"Symphony 1.3 does not process feature X from implementation Y" and if 
this was due to a bug in implementation Y we would say so in our defect 
report, and then discuss how to work around the bug to the customers' 
benefit.  I'm sure something similar would happen for other proprietary 
products. 

Where it gets interesting is when the ODF implementation is open source 
and has its defect tracking system public.  Surely we want open source 
implementations to be able to leave the plugfest with a set of bugs to 
look at? 

So I don't think we want to be so strict as to prevent all implementers 
present to make use, as engineers, of the information they received in the 
plugfest.

But what we want to avoid is things like:

* Ascribing a statement to a specific person or company.  We shouldn't be 
reporting, "Doug Mahugh from Microsoft said that Office 2007 had bugs X, Y 
and Z".

* Speaking derogatorily of another product's performance at the plugfest, 
especially where pre-release software is shown.  We want to encourage 
vendors to show their beta and earlier software.

Of course facts that are know from outside the plugfest are fair game. 
Otherwise I'd just come in, show a list of all known Symphony bugs on the 
screen for 5 minutes and declare that no one can ever talk publicly about 
Symphony bugs in the future because they are all covered by Chatham House 
Rules.   The point is the confidentiality applies to the activities and 
statements of participants in the plugfest.  But if you later find the 
same bug in the publicly available version of Symphony, then I don't think 
I have any expectation that this public fact will remain secret.  Of 
course, you still would not want to discuss conversations about it from 
the plugfest or ascribe statements to participants at the plugfest. 

The overarching theme is you want to make it safe for engineers to 
participate in the plugfest and show, test and discuss code that is not 
yet perfect.  But facts concerning publicly available code -- I don't 
think we can expect secrecy about those.

Regards,

-Rob