What we share with other people of our own thoughts spans a massive range of possibilities from the very personal to the very public.
At the most personal level roil our wildest dreams, our deepest fears, our greatest hopes. Here then also are our greatest vulnerabilities.
At the other end of the scale there are a couple of different directions. One of these extremes is full disclosure, with the idea, the preference, the observation, the expression available to the widest number of people with the fewest or lowest barriers barring its discovery by anyone else. Here stands the aspirational norm of Open Source proponents.
At this level, though, also exists doctrine, propaganda, proselytizing, marketing, promotion: Pushing a message to the utmost limits of one's abilities, to the widest number of people, whether or not they want to see or hear it. The assault on our input filters is most challenging here, as we try to sift contextually useful input as signal, and reject whatever we can, of whatever else is thrown at us, as noise.
The personal level touches on some of our most fundamental freedoms, freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. Eben Moglen speaks about the history of this freedom, and free software's relation to it, in his 2004 Wizards of OS talk, referring to the German minne song, Die Gedanken Sind Frei and about its historical antecedents. We honor and protect this freedom in a number of ways, when we protect the right against self-incrimination, or from being forced to testify against our family, or from betraying confessional confidences.
More prosaically, we recognize it when we protect disclosure of professional confidences: We recognize professional works-in-progress, pieces of communication circulated amongst only a very few, as protected from many kinds of fuller disclosure. Otherwise important work would be hindered by fear of such disclosure. Lawyers and their clients, professors and their students, doctors and their patients, collaborators and their co-workers, they all need to be able to communicate with the fullest candor in order properly to fulfill their roles, and many will not do so unless in confidence. This very limited, intimate, bounded form of communication is the next rung up in the hierarchy of disclosure. We protect freedom of thought at this level as the necessary complement to freedom of expression at a wider level.
I like to think the communities I'm a part of work toward building a world where anyone is free to express, if not necessarily pursue, any thought or preference. The commonplace and generally unobjectionable expression of this idea is "there's no accounting for taste" and its unobjectionable and victimless exercise is the "thought experiment." Perhaps someone can justify their tastes, but not always: Pascal noted "the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows not". We do not have to share someone's tastes, desires, or beliefs in order to recognize, respect, and support their humanity.
(Some, unfortunately, will have tastes that, when preference turns to pursuit, we block as criminal or pathological. Here, the pursuit is the symptom, and we can try to ameliorate it as best we can. But we fool ourselves if we think in so doing we address the causative desire the lies within, beneath. What's more, desires whose pursuits were once accepted no longer are, those once forbidden are now tolerated or even celebrated. Is it naiveté, hubris, or just opportunism, to propose that the safe choices of today stand uniquely outside history?)
We can only encourage contribution. We might even dare to expect it, to the extent we are comfortable with setting narrow, presciptive norms at all. But whatever we do, we must not pathologize reticence, reflection, discretion, contemplation, moderation. Some might be comfortable jumping in to the deep end of full disclosure and public work practices, but we deprive ourselves of balance if we make taking that leap an unavoidable first step. We can lead our work, and the people we work with, through a gradual slope of disclosure. We must not push anyone off the cliff, no matter how warm and comfortable and deep we think the water is below. What is given to us is most valuable only when it is freely given, without reservation or remorse. Giving begets giving, something taken marks a dead end.