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Grex > Coop > #278: Grex Town Hall -- How do we move forward? |  |
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| 25 new of 357 responses total. |
mary
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response 101 of 357:
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Jun 22 22:29 UTC 2010 |
Email, file storage, unix tools, party and Grex conferencing wouldn't be
part of any change I'm suggesting. Everything you know and love about
Grex stays the same.
What I am suggesting is fairly radical for us. We'll look around and
find conferencing software that is (at a minimum) able to thread
discussion, remember what a user has read, and allow a user to forget
threads. It should give administrators control over who is able to read
content and, secondarily, who can respond in discussions. It would be
nice to have control over whether the content is indexed or search
engine isolated. Administrators should have the tools to remove content
and there should be a switch that would allow/disallow contributors to
edit their own words.
And all of this should be easy enough to do that a non-techie could
moderate. The administrators would be the Board, initially. Maybe
forever.
I'd suggest the Board make all the decisions on this system after
gathering input from Grex users. No democracy. No formal voting
process. They would use their best judgement and be willing to see what
works and what doesn't and make changes as needed.
It would be an experiment. I have no idea how it would go but I'd love
to see it tried.
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mary
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response 102 of 357:
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Jun 22 22:40 UTC 2010 |
Not obvious in the above is that I'd hope this would NOT be on hardware
owned by Cyberspace Communications. It should be somewhere affordable,
where we'd have a contract for service and the expectation of a reasonably
fast connection and reliable uptime.
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kentn
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response 103 of 357:
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Jun 22 22:48 UTC 2010 |
As far as e-mail, the Board did discuss this and essentially agrees
except that users may need to send e-mail to staff on the system. If
we had a way to do that and not have outside e-mail we'd probably shut
off outside mail in a heartbeat. But from what I heard at the meeting,
sendmail doesn't set up quite like that--it wants to send e-mail off
site if it's addressed that way. Perhaps with some tricky set up it
could be made to work, but it sounds to me like the main issue is
technical not a lack of wanting to do it.
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kentn
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response 104 of 357:
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Jun 22 23:07 UTC 2010 |
Good organizations do experiment. It's how they discover new ways of
doing things when they are on the downswing. Doing what you've always
done when it clearly isn't working is a recipe for reaching oblivion
sooner rather than later. One caveat though is not to stray too far from
your core strengths and don't get hung up on fads. I don't think we'll
give up on communication and conferencing, for example, because that's
in our mission.
Not every experiment will be successful, but if we learn from what we
try, whether it worked or not, we may be able to pull out of this tail
spin. The other thing to remember about trying new things is that
if they don't work, quite often you can back out the change and go
back to what you had before (for example, if it is computer software).
Membership fees can be changed up and down, too. Not trying at all is
what will do us in.
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richard
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response 105 of 357:
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Jun 22 23:55 UTC 2010 |
re #101 mary said:
"It should give administrators control over who is able to read
content and, secondarily, who can respond in discussions"
why? I thought the idea from the beginning was for grex to be free
and open access and unmoderated. even the fw's here don't do real
moderating. what this sounds like is closed conferencing, where the
administrators choose who can post and what they can post. This is
inconsistent with grex's mission IMO.
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sholmes
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response 106 of 357:
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Jun 23 01:27 UTC 2010 |
instead of compteting with facebook it woudl be good to use facebook for
publicity. People can update t heir facebook status with things like "xyz
partied at grex" , "abc derailed one discussion on agora"....
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tonster
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response 107 of 357:
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Jun 23 02:10 UTC 2010 |
resp:101: I'm not sure I can even pick out the worst idea you made in
that post; I don't think I can agree with any of it. Why does the Board
get unilateral control over everyone's content? Why can people make a
statement, and not correct it? Why do you feel the board needs to have
all control of the direction of Grex, while the membership (who, I don't
know, pays to keep Grex in existance?) has no say. Not to mention I see
no mention at all of staff input, and I'm assuming you'll want us to
implement this monstrosity! I also would have to say removing unix, file
system space, party, ability to compile programs, etc, pretty much
removes what grex is. I don't think it's at all the grex we know and
love at that point. It's just another message board.
resp:103: Why do people keep bringing up sendmail? I've said several
times now grex does not run sendmail. Even if it did, to say that it's
not possible to run email and only have a subset of users have the
ability to receive email is ridiculous. It's absolutely possible with
postfix, and I'd say it's almost certainly possible with sendmail and
pretty much every other email software on the planet. Firewall rules and
other unix utilities can prevent users from attempting to send mail from
the system. For that matter, we could just host grex.org email on
google apps if we wanted to (or on my system as previously suggested)
and have only the accounts we need forwarding to their destination.
resp:105: I haven't agreed with much you've said lately, Richard, but I
think you're right on here. I strongly disagree with the idea that once
I complete a post, I cannot modify and can only delete it and enter it
again. That's ridiculous. I can agree to a certain extent that certain
conferences should/can be fishbowled and left for only certain people to
post/respond, but removing the ability to modify your responses is just
wrong.
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kentn
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response 108 of 357:
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Jun 23 02:42 UTC 2010 |
I guess you had to be at the last Board meeting. I may have misheard
but sendmail was mentioned, perhaps in a different context. The
result was, no one there felt it was possible (or knew if it was
possible). Anyway, if it is possible to do, let's talk about it at the
next Board meeting and decide if it's the way we want to go. Thanks.
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mary
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response 109 of 357:
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Jun 23 14:10 UTC 2010 |
I don't think I'm going to turn Tony into a fan of this idea, but still,
I'll correct some obvious misunderstandings in his reps: 107.
This is about experimenting with a new, secondary online community.
Cyberspace Communications would be the parent. None of it would apply
to Grex. If you didn't get an account and log in to the new system
your life would be unchanged. Whew! ;-)
The reason I'd put the Board in charge is that it would afford some
accountability for the decisions. They are elected. Too, having a
small group administrate would allow for changes to made reasonably
quickly. "Try this and if it doesn't work we'll turn it off" kind of
things. Again, it's an experiment. I am asking a lot of our volunteer
Board here - they'd be be setting themselves up for heaps of criticism
and simultaneously have to work together as a group. Not easy stuff.
My (no doubt) incomplete list of necessary switches would be part of
trying out new approaches to old problems. Allowing folks to edit their
own responses is something we don't, maybe can't do now. It should be
possible for a test tube community to go that route if the admins want
to try it and see how it goes. That was just one example of on/off
features we should be able to easily tweak.
I'm thinking this project wouldn't require any staff involvement. None.
It would be an "out of the box" online project. At least that's what
I'm hoping we do because we don't have available staff to do otherwise.
The few we have should see to Grex's needs.
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tod
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response 110 of 357:
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Jun 23 14:21 UTC 2010 |
accountability
lol
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tonster
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response 111 of 357:
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Jun 23 15:25 UTC 2010 |
resp:109: As I stated above, we CAN easily allow people to modify their
own responses. It's wrong to have it setup to not allow this. A
modified response clearly shows that it has been modified (a header is
added that says 'last modified on x date'), so no one can pass off that
it's their original text. I'm not sure I understand the reasoning for
getting a third party hosted conferencing system. It seems like it'd be
better to 'own our own content' so to speak.
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mary
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response 112 of 357:
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Jun 23 15:49 UTC 2010 |
"Third party" gets it off of our old, Provide-housed hardware and
eliminates the need for staff setup and maintenance. The downside, in
part, is that the interface will be new with a learning curve. And change
sucks.
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mary
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response 113 of 357:
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Jun 23 15:52 UTC 2010 |
Tony, if you're looking for user support allowing folks to edit their
responses on Grex, I'm there. I see room for abuse, to be sure, but
that's true of just about everything, and I'd like to see it tried.
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mary
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response 114 of 357:
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Jun 23 15:54 UTC 2010 |
That last was entered by a user who has zero skills when it comes to proof
reading.
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slynne
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response 115 of 357:
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Jun 23 15:55 UTC 2010 |
As long as I can easily cut and paste other people's responses into mine
so they can't edit them after I respond to them, I'll be happy.
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kentn
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response 116 of 357:
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Jun 23 17:55 UTC 2010 |
Since you own the response, I'd expect you'd be in control of its
contents, not others who have responses quoted. If they want to respond
to your comment, they can in their own response. I don't know where the
idea that editing implies others can edit your responses comes from but
that's not what I'm envisoning.
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slynne
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response 117 of 357:
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Jun 23 18:28 UTC 2010 |
That isnt what I mean. I don't like the idea of people editing their own
responses if I have entered a reply to their response. However, if I cut
and paste their response into mine, then they cannot do that. That is
all I am concerned about.
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tonster
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response 118 of 357:
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Jun 23 19:08 UTC 2010 |
resp:117: you used m-net for a long time, slynne. when was that ever a
problem there? I don't think I've ever seen that occur. We've never
prevented people from modifying their responses on m-net.
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tonster
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response 119 of 357:
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Jun 23 19:10 UTC 2010 |
and as I stated before, it's clear from the added 'response last
modified' header that a response has been changed, so it should be
pretty clear just based on that that a response to that response could
have been altered in that way.
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tonster
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response 120 of 357:
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Jun 23 19:13 UTC 2010 |
resp:112,resp:113: I still feel that doing that pretty much removes all
of what is Grex. It becomes just another website at that point.
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kentn
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response 121 of 357:
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Jun 23 19:17 UTC 2010 |
Right.
If you cut and paste a response and they edit theirs, that will just
show what you responded to. Feel free to editor yours if you want
to make this clear.
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kentn
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response 122 of 357:
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Jun 23 19:19 UTC 2010 |
(My response was to 119 and 117. If I could edit my response, I would
have added this information to 121. Instead you get another response
and have to figure out how this response relates).
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slynne
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response 123 of 357:
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Jun 23 19:26 UTC 2010 |
resp:118 No. I don't think it is a problem there but it could be. It
might be nice on Mnet if a way of cutting and pasting quotes were easier
though.
resp:121 Yep. That works for me although if we are adding new features,
the blockquote tag feature makes such things easier.
I am NOT against adding the ability to edit ones own responses at all. I
just would like a way to more easily cut and past text in a way that
makes it more clear that the text being cut and pasted isn't mine.
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rcurl
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response 124 of 357:
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Jun 23 20:08 UTC 2010 |
I don't understand why anyone should want to post-edit their responses. This
conferencing thing is a conversation, and conversations can't be edited. If
one wants to correct themselves in a conversation, they just do that with a
new statement (response...). I see only confusion being engendered by users
post-editing their responses.
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slynne
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response 125 of 357:
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Jun 23 20:11 UTC 2010 |
I don't expect it will be a feature used very often and when it is used,
it will most likely be used to correct typos. I doubt I'll do much
editing other than typos myself.
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