A week ago I thought it might be useful to enter an item giving a concise
analysis of the two item undeletion proposals now being considered.
Unfortunately, the vote happens to have occured while I am up to my gills
with work to do, and I haven't been able to find time to finish it until
now, when only a few days are left to the vote.  I also haven't had time
to read the last few weeks of discussion.  I imagine it is voluminous 
and exhausting, and the number of peripheral issues and sideshows has
risen even higher than when I last looked.

So I think I'll go ahead and post what I drafted a week ago: a 
relatively brief discription of the situation and my biased opinion of
the fundamental issue.

BACKGROUND

The proposals being voted on relate to the restoration of two sets of 
items that have been deleted.  The two sets of items in question are
Valerie Mates' Baby Diary and John Perry's divorce item.  Valerie has
been entering her responses to her baby diary, which was linked between
the parenting and femme confereces, for about six years.  Her responses
covered daily details of pregnancy and child rearing.  In his divorce 
item, John Perry gave daily reports of events when his wife left him.
Both sets of items contained many responses from other Grex users.

These items were unusual in that Valerie and John each exposed a lot 
of their private lives in them, and in that nearly all discussion in
them focused on their lives.  At the time these items were entered, 
doing so was something that Valerie and John felt comfortable with,
but for various reasons both of them now want their items to be removed.

Valerie recently discovered that for the last several years, her baby 
diary had been continously parodied on M-Net.  She does not like her life 
being put to such uses, and so prefers to remove the diary from Grex. 
John has come to terms with his divorce, and doesn't want the angry
responses from a period of instability in his life on permanent view. 
He fears that material from those items could someday be used against
him or his son.

Grex has an established policy that any user may delete their own past
posts.  So if these items were restored, then they would be restored
without the posts by Valerie and John.  They would contain only the posts
by other users discussing what they said.  However it would still be
easy to glean much of what Valerie and John said from the other posts
-- especially the most "sensational" parts which would have been the
most discussed.  Neither John nor Valerie feel this would sufficient to
remotely satisfy their concerns.

THE CORE ISSUE 

The core issue that members are being asked to vote on here is whether
the concerns of these two users are sufficient grounds to justify deletion
of the entire items, including responses by other users.

Free speech has been an issue of traditional importance to Grex.
We don't believe in censoring our users.  But censorship comes in many
shades of grey.  Recently, polytarp entered about 100 copies of Plato's
Republic in Grex's agora conference.  These were deleted and nobody was
upset to see them go.  The case we are considering here is not as clear
cut, but obviously not all censorship is equally bad.

Neither of these items were active discussions.  John's divorce item
has not been active for a couple years.  Valerie's most recent baby item
had been frozen for weeks before it was removed, and the others were as
much as five years old.  If their deletion had not been announced, it
could have been a long time before anyone noticed that they were gone.
Furthermore, it is not systematic censorship of any idea, opinion, 
or person that is being proposed here.  If anyone who gave John advice 
in his divorce item wishs to give the same advice again, they are not
being prevented.  If this is censorship, then it is a form of censorship
that does not interfere at all with active discussions.

In the end, it comes down to a question of what values Grex holds highest.
If the most important goal for Grex is to be an uncompromising bastion
against censorship in any form, then you get one answer.  If our goal is
to be a caring community of people, then you get another.  In practice,
we are probably something of each, and we have to find a balance on
a case-by- case basis.  It's a question of how to balance abstract
principles against common courtesy.

Examine the alternatives:

  If the items are restored, they will be restored without Valerie and
  John's posts.  They will be at best the sad, tattered remains of their
  original selves.  But in the wake of this vote, many people will stream
  over to read them anyway, guessing accurately or inaccurately at what
  exactly John and Valerie said about their personal lives years ago.
  Little of true value will have been saved and the concerns of John and
  Valerie would have been utterly ignored, but we will have stood firm
  against censorship.  Valerie will not begin discussing parenting again.
  John will not begin discussing his divorce again.  No discussion will have
  been restored.  From an ideological point of view, this outcome is fine.
  From a personal point of view, it is mean-spirited and petty to retain
  these old details of people's lives on public display against their will
  just to prove a point.

  If the items are not restored, polytarp, jp2 and others will strut
  around in coop for the rest of their lives crowing about how Grex stands
  for censorship.  However, they've already been doing that for years, so
  it won't be much of a change.  These cases will not set a low bar for
  future deletions of items.  Jp2, who is the author of the proposal saying
  that both items should be restored, has also been asking that one of the
  items he started be deleted.  This won't happen unless he too can
  convince more than half the membership that there is some overriding
  reason why it should go.  Members of our community may, however, have
  a sense that their personal concerns will be treated with a modicum of
  respect and sensitivity.

Once upon a time, the founders of Grex decided that instead of a "policy"
conference like the one M-Net has, Grex should have a "coop" conference.
I think that this was intended to convey the idea that the goal of the
conference was not to hammer out a rigid book of rules which could
be blindly followed to run the system, but to serve as a venue for
cooperative decision making.  Grex does not, in fact, have any formal
policy saying whole items cannot be deleted.  Grex has scarcely any formal
policies of any description, and does not want any.  We have a belief in
free speech and we have a belief in community, and we have the freedom
to balance those on a case-by-case basis in a way that makes sense.
I submit that the restoration of these items would make no sense.

157 responses total.

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