response 123 of 255:

Jun 11 20:45 UTC 2000

Then say that.  Say it will be handled with the same sensitivity 
as email.  Just make your intention clear so folks know what 
they are voting for.

response 125 of 255:

Jun 11 20:49 UTC 2000

The motion makes no attempt to say what staff might do with access to 
erased response text, nor should it, nor will it.  It simply says that 
staff is the only entity having access.  Mr. voteadm, consider my 
motion wording unambigously final.

response 127 of 255:

Jun 11 21:26 UTC 2000

I'm curious.  What specifically do you want staff to be able to do with it
that they wouldn't be able to do with email?

response 129 of 255:

Jun 12 01:08 UTC 2000

I'm trying to figure that out.  All the talk about "at their discretion"
suggests much broader latitude than Jan implied by pointing me at the
guidelines page earlier.

response 131 of 255:

Jun 12 09:09 UTC 2000

I think people here are getting way *WAY* too tied up in lawyer-land.
There is a danger here, in that there are a lot of people who confuse
the rules for the deeper sense of right, or who enjoy twisting the rules
to see what breaks, or simply just don't want to deal with it and tune
out & drop out.  To date, we haven't had a lot of problems with this on
grex.  But it's not hard to find examples of this elsewhere, that have
caused real damage.

I believe there's a limit as to how far we should go to protect things,
how much we should protect the system, vs. how much we should protect
individuals, and I believe we ought to be especially careful about
creating additional liability for the system.  To pretend that words
from a conference ought to be treated tread the same as e-mail could
present a real risk to us; there is a bunch of law that concerns the
privacy of e-mail, with some pretty sharp teeth.  At the same time,
words from a conference are *not* private - they are no longer secret,
and are in fact public knowledge to a lot of people.  Even if the actual
words can in fact be expunged from the universe, their impression
remains.  It shapes the subsequent flow of discussion, and arguing about
who owns the thoughts that come out of that is like arguing over how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Like it or not, this is a system where the real value is not the storage
of material, but the *publication* of information, and most of our
community is in a very real sense surfing the wave of information.  Most
of the stuff that is posted here is seen nearly at once by hundreds of
eyes, and even attempting to pretend that it's possible to "take back
words" is a lie.  The liminality of experience is the reality here;
everything else is illusion.

As it happens, most people are already equipped with a perfectly fine
internal censor, that keeps them from blabbing things like their own
password, credit card number, or their lover's secret name to the world
at large.  Indeed, in most people, this censor is sufficiently powerful
that the real challenge is not to keep people from saying what they
ought not say, but to get people to actually participate in the first
place.  It is very rare for people to say things they shouldn't have
said, and even rarer for them to later wish they hadn't said it.

When we code things in policy, we are creating more should's and
shouldn'ts.  This can't fix the problems with someone blabbing what they
shouldn't; that's a past thing.  What we are instead creating is an
opportunity for someone to sue grex, in the name of violating their
privacy, when the fault is really their own.  Is this really going to
help that person?  Is it really going to benefit grex?

Whenever you create policy, you can't just ask "what do I think is
right?" You need to also ask "how will this help? and "how will this
hurt?" It's easy to make rules.  It's a lot harder to make things
better.

response 133 of 255:

Jun 12 14:36 UTC 2000

(Voteadm hat:  The vote program is now up.  Type "!vote" or "vote",
depending on flavor of prompt.  The rest should be self-explanatory.)

response 135 of 255:

Jun 12 14:55 UTC 2000

I agree with Marcus and John too.

response 137 of 255:

Jun 12 15:32 UTC 2000

        Fortunately for everyone, this isn't uselessnet.

        Now, for fun: try to find your responses older than a year.

response 139 of 255:

Jun 12 16:58 UTC 2000

So... if you ignore the law, or pretend that heeding the law will somehow
make the laws applicable to email govern conference content, you... what?
Marcus seems to be arguing that following the law constitutes getting
"tied up in lawyer land", while simultaneously arguing that system policy
should be dictated upon what seems to be a bizarre pseudo-legal fantasy. 
I'm not sure what people are agreeing with.

response 141 of 255:

Jun 12 21:59 UTC 2000

I don't think Grex should ignore any laws.

response 143 of 255:

Jun 13 02:44 UTC 2000

As far as I can tell, the web vote is not set up.

response 145 of 255:

Jun 13 04:26 UTC 2000

I don't know whether anyone's tried it.  Since they honor the X-No-Archive
flag, they at least have an argument that you had the option of avoiding
archiving of your posts.