Concur'd on all points, Matt. If people are concerned about their contributions being publicly viewable, they can post to 'confidential' or another private list - or simply have an in-person conversation. I'd like to know the particular use cases for which we would need closed, private mailing lists - because I strongly believe that open and transparent communication and documentation is essential to this project having an impact not just within our community, but for the wider world. If we intend to create something greater than ourselves, our methods of organizing, the problems we face and overcome, the things that bind or break us, our experiences of creating the space and communicating about it, all of this is vital and important knowledge we have a responsibility to share so that others may learn from, iterate off, adapt, fork, and possibly change their own corners of the world for the better, inspired by what we're doing here.
Let's not keep our history to ourselves. Knowing that our communications are public and archivable also keeps us accountable to ourselves, each other, and the world. We should always _expect_ what we communicate online to become potentially public, and may as well just own it, be responsible for our words, and communicate with kindness and wisdom - because words are often the most powerful artifacts we leave behind for future generations to inherit.
My favorite quote on communication, in particular the debate of dialogue vs. dissemination and the way in which communication flows from internal dialogue to outward dissemination:
Justice that is not loving is not just; love that is not just is not loving. Just so, dissemination without dialogue can become stray scatter, and dialogue without dissemination can be interminable tyranny. The motto of communication theory ought to be: Dialogue with the self, dissemination with the other. This is another way of stating the ethical maxim: Treat yourself like an other and the other like a self.
(John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, p. 57)