What is the place for one-on-one communication in open-source?

One of Red Hat's mantras is "develop in the open". There is an entire website, opensource.com, with tons of articles about this idea (this article in particular is great).

One aspect of "develop in the open" means keeping conversations as public as possible. Don't email or IM a developer directly; instead, email a development mailing list (possibly using the To: and CC: fields for your intended developer) or public IRC channel instead. It's hard to overstate the community benefits of this, and again opensource.com explains the benefits in more detail than you could ever want.

Sometimes people send me direct instant messages seeking information, instead of asking in a public channel. I think there is a fear of "spamming the channel" or fear of looking foolish. I can respect people's desire to avoid looking foolish. I've even done the same, and some wise people called me out on it. I suggest that you will not look nearly as foolish as you expected, though. Let's face it, if this topic was so obvious, you would have found some documentation on it already, right :) Maybe things are just hard to figure out! Maybe many other people would benefit from this probably-under-documented information!

In these conversations, I try to steer back into an IRC channel, replying "That's a great question. Would you be ok if we continued the conversation in #channel-that-relates-to-what-we-are-talking-about?" Then I tab over to that channel and say "so-and-so: we were just discussing <my rephrasing of their question>" to give some context to everyone else in the room. Then I answer the question so everyone can see it.

I've been thinking about a corollary to this concept this week: There is also a time for one-on-one IM conversations, and that is when you have to bring up a sensitive topic and you need to build some relational credibility.

Let's say I've noticed a mistake in some code or process. Let's also imagine I do not have positive relational credibility with the person responsible. Maybe this person is a different personality type than me, and we both drive each other nuts. Maybe it's been a pressure-cooker situation for any number of other reasons. If I bring up this person's mistake in a public IRC channel, we just go deeper on the negative spiral, and my behavior can look threatening. I've found it's more effective to bring up mistakes as privately as possible.

Of course we want to default to open and develop in the open. On the other hand, sometimes there is a greater good, where we a trade bit of openness for relational credibility. Once the relationship is there, maybe we'll get a chance to discuss future problems more openly without fear.