[axxs-sysadmin] decision-making [was: Domain Hosting for Manukoreri.net]

[boud]

hi axxs-admin,

On Sat, 25 Nov 2006, hugh trevelyan wrote:

> I'm working full time now, away from my monitor. So my concern is being
> left out of decisions that concern me. And IRC isn't even accessible in
> retrospect as an archive, as listmail is.

It should be relatively easy to make a script for a bot which logs a
channel, and regularly cleans the log of ip's and posts it as a
file to an apache-visible directory as a plain text file. Probably
best that the directory protections are fairly conservative (NoExecCgi or
whatever) in case someone posts code into the channel.

Here's my own irc-log cleaning script for irssi style logs:

#!/bin/sh

sed -e 's/\[[^]@]*@[^]]*\]/\[\.\.\.\]/g' $1 | \
sed -e 's/\(.\{60\}[^ ]*\) \([^ ]\)/\1\n\2/g'

exit 0

The idea is that it removes ip's and breaks up long lines.

A cron job can then post the cleaned log every 5 minutes or 1 hour 
or 1 day depending on what the purpose of the channel is and how 
urgent it is for people to follow it.

Some people did this for #radioappo with the cleaned output (not the
same cleaning script) posted to:

http://www.iteration.org/radioappo.txt


If everybody is warned that the channel is automatically logged and
published on the web, then i don't see any strong argument against it.

Of course, some people have difficulty accepting that a group of "us"
(whoever "us" are) organising something socially should have
everything we say posted publicly.

On the other hand, that's what indymedia has *claimed* to be and that's
what the wikipedia culture generally claims to do. (i know that axxs
is not the same thing as indymedia(TM), but there are clearly many goals
in common. :)


Hmmmmmmmmm...........  Probably most people here know that many people
in indymedia are thinking of the "next phase" of indymedia, especially
at a technical level. This is IMHO largely because the general
software community (beyond indymedia(TM)), including people who are
not committed to free software and/or don't care about the digital
divide, have in some sense taken over indymedia - in the general sense
of indymedia - and given it the name "Web2.0". Part of the reason for
this is lowering technical barriers to participation, or at least,
lowering technical barriers to *partial* participation while leaving
deep, centralised control to secretive, corporate style leaders and
organisations like google.  And so a fundamental difficulty in indymedia
is that we are trying to have all levels of control, including the 
"deepest" levels to be genuinely open to participation - which is difficult
given that someone with weak tech knowledge has difficulty participating.

Anyway, the point is that if we cron-jobbed cleaned irc logs to the web,
then it would be possible to have the much more intense and rapid feedback
communication style of irc become as transparent as archived mailing lists.

An irc channel would become more like a room where people can casually 
come along, listen and possibly participate in a "direct" conversation
and de facto rough consensus decision-making, in a way that people outside
of the room are not totally left out of the picture.

Other people willing to summarise can then e.g. condense these on wiki
pages.

This could also set a precedent for what (IMHO) we should set as the
minimum acceptable standard of decision-making in ANY collective
organisation, whether it's the public service or a private company or
a school or a hospital. The only exceptions would be things that concern
particular individuals, which would be private in order to protect their
private lives.

How does this relate to web2.0? IMHO people *are* interested in
participation not just at a shallow level, but also they want to know
who is "in control". While it's true that it's already technically possible
for anyone to join in indy irc and log the conversations, in practice 
it's difficult for most "non-techies". (E.g. recently there was an
error in the link from the poland indy main page which points to a page
which in turn points to the lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-pl-*
pages. One of the experienced imc pl people complained that the mailing
list archives were "no longer available" - i.e. this person didn't 
know or forgot how to find the URL of the mailing lists.)

So lowering this tech barrier by croning irc logs might just possibly
be something encouraging participation, better communication etc.

Once we get torun organised as an imc, i'll probably propose this
locally...  But it might be good globally as well, so i'll probably 
cc a similar version of this email to imc-communication.

cheers
boud