Member Initiative: Do Nothing For Four Weeks. I'm serious. I'm afraid that the whiplash being created by being forced to chose between the two previous items is making Grex into an emotionally driven, lines-in-the-sand, frenzy. I'm proposing a cooling-off period in which we make no decisions, and stop the running of all time-based governance processes. I'm not sure how to suspend the rules, but that IS what I'm proposing. Let's all take a deep breath, and not be driven into even more unfortunate reactive decisions. We stand to lose a lot more by whipping back and forth and making decisions based on some feeling of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it urgency. Grex will not go away if we pause for a bit. As an organizational development consultant I am seeing serious signs of self-destruction here.56 responses total.
Colleen, you are an eminently sensible person. Thanks for this proposal. I will support it when an opportunity becomes available to do so.
thats a fine idea, but util this issue is addressed, staff should move to disable use of the program valerie wrote to mass delete old responses. It is fair to ask that the users have time to consider this, as you suggest
I would agree that that program is part of the frenzy and use should be suspended as part of the cooling off process.
Sounds good to me, Colleen.
Thanks, cmcgee. I, at least, want a chance to think things thhrough before making any decisions. Right now, I can barely keep up with the flow of text, much less digest it all.
Sorry, I consider this more histrionics! Cool off, scmool off. So far, all that has happened is a bunch of talk. Isn't that what grex is for, talk? In fact in a "twisted" way this episode has driven more talk out of the woodwork than anything I can remember happening on grex, even the scribble log escapades. The strength of a system, policy, bylaw is that it *won't* be set aside in "troubling times". So I say *let* jp2's & jep's proposals work their way forward until a possible time to hold a vote, and if a vote comes, let it have its 2 weeks or whatever it is to be decided. That's plenty of time to have more TALK and convince people one way or the other, if needed. A proposal to suspend good, in-place mechanisms is the most harmful thing to come up yet out of this mess.
just becuase YOU think it is a good in-place mechanism albaugh doesn't mean everyone else does (speaking here about valerie's program which has only been "in place" a couple of days. I really think Valerie should have let the users discuss it and decide if they want such a program. I think it is highly dangerous to have a program that enables users to scribble multiples of posts at one time with no further effort. This is how people who happen to be in a bad mood can do create destruction, because it is easy to do. At the least, you should only ever be able to scribble one post at a time.
What exactly do people want? An emergency meeting of the board to settle this? The next regular board meeting is January 19th, I have no doubt this will be discussed if it isn't already on the agenda. Or is the intent of the other items here to whip the membership into enough of a frenzy to make a rash and potentially unmaintainable referendum?
I don't see much of a frenzy here, do you?
HEY< GUYS< WHAT HAPPENS IF ALL THREE OF THE RECENT PROPOSALS PASS?!? THEY"RE MUTUALLY CONDRADICTORY AND HOW DO WE DECIDE WHICH TAKE PRECEDENCE?!
then I guess the board votes on which of the passed proposals to actually enact
What if someone enters an initiative saying the Board can't do that?
resp:0 It has seemed that matters of diplomacy and negiotation have suffered a bit. I have read carefully through the mass of these debates, trying to make the best sense of it all. I have offered some of my experience rather than to openly enter the debate. Perhaps I am idealistic, but I think this proposal allows us some time to consider such discussion rather than make decisions that might appear quick or hasty later. resp:3 As long as everyone agrees the script should be suspended as part of this proposal, I have no problem with it.
Of course, there's no-way to "suspend" the script.
To "suspend" the script, I would ask Valerie or another staff member to make sure no one could run it on Grex. I would also ask that anyone with the skills to create another script that achieves the same effect (robotic removal of all posts created by a single login and uid) refrain from doing so for the same time period. It may be that this becomes a type of robotic action that is forbidden under our no-bots policy.
People here are very angry, just like Valerie was angry. I think they need to be allowed to vent even if that means removing all of everything they've ever posted. Even if it means they walk away or take a break from Grex. This will settle down. Grex will survive. I find it reassuring, actually, that people care enough to get upset. I'd *not* try to meddle with any additional rules at this time or try to calm things down until they're ready to calm down.
Re #15: Minor point: Valerie is not a staff member.
Re. 15: There's still no-way to disable or hinder anyone who wants to run the script.
Donning by voteadm hat... The fact that there are now three conflicting member proposals on the table entered at about the same time raises some interesting procedural questions that the bylaws don't address. I'd appreciate some guidance from the board about how to procede.
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Re #17: That's true, and not a minor point. Re #20: Jep gets to "worry about" it too, since he made one of the proposals.
The GreX staff should prepare a list of blacklisted scripts, and post it somewhere, so we can all balk at how long it would be.
Re resp:2 and resp:3: I think that would be silly. Valerie's script only automates something that everyone can already do. It's ridiculous to tell people, "Okay, you can go scribble all your responses by hand, but don't you dare automate it!" It's also unenforcible.
We apply that rule to other operations, like sending mail.
1) This proposal is well intentioned, but I think that the delays already built in to our voting process are sufficient to serve the purpose for which it was proposed. 2) Because the posting-removal script only automates a process that any user can freely engage in anyway, and it won't run without the user being logged in to run it (correct?) depermitting the script or otherwise prohibiting other similar scripts sets an unclear precedent and may be worse than leaving it alone. 3) The people posting most vehemently in the aftermath of these events are those with the least at stake. If you take those noises out of the picture and reevaluate, you'd find that there is much concern being expressed, but that the process is not proceeding any differently from any other controversial matter we've dealt with in the past. As far as I can tell, this was coming sooner or later anyway, and it was bound to be a test of the ability of Grex to survive growing pains. This is a process all small organizations go through as they grow, in some form or other, and either they survive it and go on, or they don't and something else comes along to fill the niche. You can't short circuit this process and be doing Grex any favors. And changing the rules of the game as this proposal does is just that.
24: Thea reasons for that particular prohibition are distinctly different.
Earlier, I expressed some support of this proposal. I've now reconsidered. I think Mary and Eric have made good points, and I will have to get caught up on the other items before the vote. The voting period is two weeks, as I recall, which doesn't begin until after the discussion period. If that is insufficient time, I can always vote to preserve the status quo ante. :)
de-permitting the script for valerie's program or otherwise disallowing automated scribbling is a matter of avoiding reckless behaviour. Suppose somebody goes on a flaming spree in Agora and insults everyone in site and gets in fights and has people responding to him upset. And then he runs this script and has all his posts automatically removed. This single handedly tears up the conference and makes people with posts responding to him potentially look bad because all of a sudden there is no context for their own heated responses. Only allowing scribbling one message at a time makes removing so many posts from any one conference impractical. It could still be done but it would take so much time few would do it. It is a safety net and would encourage users to have to go slowly and think more about scribbling post after post. These conferences are what Grex is all about. Staff should want them kept intact as much as possible because without them, what is Grex? Those conferences aren't just a collection of individual posts, they are WHOLES, they are a collective work. This just brings up the whole copyright debate again, but I think people who post here do so knowing that their words are being in effect published, that they give permission to Grex to spread their words over the web as part of Grex. And as such when you scribble or delete posts, it affects more than just you. Grex should not encourage mass scribbling by allowing it to be too convenient to do so
But by only allowing a whole conference, you're also warranting the deletion of conferences in their entirety. A contradiction on your behalf.
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Re resp:28: How likely do you think your hypothetical situation is? And how would it be any worse than someone just posting a bunch of flames in agora and leaving them there? It's not as if that's never happened.
(I've seen such behaviour before. The 'victims' quickly 1) remove their now-contextless comments and 2) learn to think before responding. Sometimes, it takes a few iterations for 2) to occur.)
That doesn't seem like such a terrible outcome. ;>
People can't scribble what other people quoted from their responses, so perhaps we should all start each response by quoting the previous one?
The _real_ fun begins when people can edit their past responses: put up some flame-bait, garner a few flames, then switch the bait to something completely innocuous. The learning is a bit faster in those situations, I think. 'Twas this scenario that garnered so much opposition during the censored-log debate.
Richard, I think that you see Grex in a very different light than I do. I NEVER have thought of it as "publishing" my words. I felt that I was talking in a limited medium that would eventually be erased and forgotten.
Hoo boy.
#37...but twila, how did you think that when grex doesn't erase its confs. even when a conf is closed and archived, it is still kept read-only. The only way whole confs would get erased under current setup is if grex is taken down completely, or if there is some disastrous disk failure and there are no backups to restore anything. Otherwise these conferences should be around for anyone to read for years and years to come, as long as there is a grex. I think that is part of JEP's concern actually, although I think the odds of his son years from now finding his posts in some old archived grex conf to be remote enough that I don't think his concern is all that warranted.
resp:37 Yeah, I'll second that.
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I suppose that I should have known this, but I didn't. I really didn't know that the old agoras weren't erased at some point. I did know that while the agoras were active that they could be read by anyone who accessed grex, but that's different from having them there forever and ever amen.
Yeah. God bless.
Jesus lives!
Re. 42: What is God?
The Virgin Mary had three kids.
larry, curley, and moe!
<donning voteadm hat...> I've posted a summary of the rules regarding voting in item 75, response 179 (resp:75,179). The earliest voting could begin, should Colleen elect to bring it to a vote, is January 23.
Actually, I don't think I'll be bringing this to a vote. We seem to have had sufficient cooling off time, and I don't think anyone is feeling overwhelmed and rushed any more. Often it is useful to explicitly state that once of your choices is "Do Nothing".
I'm afraid that *this* proposal was a non-starter from the beginning. Even if it has passed, it would have no effect on the 2 proposals that were already brough forth. And I think this was just a bad idea, period.
If the proposal is killed, the item should be frozen to signify it (with a final response declaring it killed). Discussion can continue in another item.
I don't see a need for that, but it's up to cmcgee in any case.
Don't I wish this would go away until people got some sense. Grex has become a black hole of nagativity, which this whole issue over scribbled items is a symptom, not a cause. It's been building around here for months, maybe no one else has noticed. It's why I don't really post much right now, other than the fact that I just moved and had no computer access at the new place for a couple of weeks.
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I wish I knew if that were sarcasm or not.
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TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
You have several choices: