Here we examine the issues regarding writing and working openly in wiki. Wiki does not require us to work openly as we can run a private server on our laptop or home machine.
However wiki does encourage us to do so, and the more of us that take up the offer the better the experience for every writer
-- Pam
Andrius Kulikauskas influenced me to try and write openly as my default approach rather than writing privately as the default.
I won't go into the pros and cons here.
Sufficient to say that I try to do it. Part of that attempt is my exploration of appropriate and effective ways to write open letters instead of private emails.
One of the problems of writing open letters is that there is already some relationship between the author and the intended recipient (even if the "relationship" is only some brief exchange at an event that both have attended). Other readers may have different relationships with the author, or no relationship at all.
notify:Ward
This means that the open letter is in fact being written to two kinds of reader. One is the person who has been the catalyst for the open letter. The other is a more general reader.
It would be great to have a wiki format for open letters. Then the open letter itself could be almost identical to the email that it was replacing.
Additional information for the general reader could be dropped in as wiki links.
Some of this information would be the same for all open letters, other links would be more content specific.
Private information such as references to family situations, health etc are of course never included in open letters.
That kind of content goes in the personal email that informs the intended recipient of the link to