response 13 of 73:

Jul 30 04:42 UTC 1999

I've shut down Grex temporarily for various reasons enough times that I've
lost count.  That hasn't been with specific board authority, and sometimes
not even with prior consultation with anybody else, but rather just using my
authority as a staff member.  There have been some shutdowns lasting a whole
weekend or more which have been done by staff members without board approval,
because they were needed for system maintenance.  In this case, nobody was
talking about a permenant shutdown.

As I've said, I'm not on the board anymore.  I wasn't at the meeting. 
However, here's my understanding of the situation.  The judge had promised
to issue a ruling before August 1st.  There was never much doubt that there
would be a ruling one way or the other.  In his ruling, the judge could block
the whole law, or part of the law, or none of it at all.  It seemed quite
likely that the judge was going to block the whole law, in which case this
wouldn't be necessary.  However, if the judge did something less than that,
we would have had to wait for his ruling to see exactly what he did do.  That
ruling might potentially have come with only 24 hours, or I suppose
theoretically less but I'm guessing the ruling was unlikely to get issued on
a weekend, to figure out a course of action.  Given that, the board decided
to do this temporary shutdown in order to figure out what to do.  From my
position as somebody whose no longer on the board, and only does staff stuff
very occasionally, it would be easy to say that the board should have kept
Grex running at all costs without analyzing the risk.  It's the board members,
and probably the more active staff members, who would potentially be facing
jail time over this.  I'm not sure what I would have done in their position,
but what they did certainly strikes me as a reasonable temporary measure.

response 15 of 73:

Jul 30 06:19 UTC 1999

I'll echo Eric.  If the law had gone into effect, the board would have to shut
down Grex because of the *law*, Richard.  

For some odd reason, I just knew he was going to enter this item.

response 17 of 73:

Jul 30 08:02 UTC 1999

<smirks>

response 19 of 73:

Jul 30 13:30 UTC 1999

I don't have a particular view about the Board's *authority*, but
I seriously question its *wisdom*.

The Board did not even give us Grexers the courtesy of posting
a warning about the shutdown in the Message of the Day, as far as
I could see.  I only saw the notice here in the Coop Conference.
Coop is an acquired taste, and notice in Coop alone was grossly
inadequate.

response 21 of 73:

Jul 30 14:46 UTC 1999

I don't like that reasoning.  All of us would have been affected if the 
system had been shut down, not just the Board.  People who depend on 
Grex for their e-mail had the right to expect enough notice to make 
their own arrangements.  There would have been some adversely affected 
people if Grex hadn't gotten lucky about the injunction, and a lot of it 
would have been unnecessary.

I wouldn't have expected Grex to be of the "don't tell people, it's for 
their own good" mindset, and I wouldn't have expected you to be an 
advocate for that kind of position, STeve.

response 23 of 73:

Jul 30 15:44 UTC 1999

STeve has a point.  If it had come out the other way, I'm sure an 
announcement regarding the shutdown would have been posted in the MOTD 
a day or two beforehand.  Grex has been down without announcment before 
(for various reasons), so I would have just assumed it was one of those 
times had it *not* been posted.

Regardless, Grex is not shutting down, so this is all moot.

response 25 of 73:

Jul 30 17:55 UTC 1999

Re #23:  I hope that would have been the case.  It reminds me of those
sci-fi movies where everyone's doomed, but the government doesn't tell them
to avoid a panic.

response 27 of 73:

Jul 30 19:02 UTC 1999

Thank you, Mary.  I'm sure it seems like I'm trying to drag someone, 
anyone, over the coals, but I'm not.  I appreciate what you did (I 
disagree, but I still appreciate the work).  I support the Board 
overall.  It's a good board.  I think the actions taken by the Board 
about shutting down Grex were one wrong thing after another, though.  I 
hope nothing similar ever happens again.

STeve, you mention "likelihood" pretty prominently in your explanations 
of why there was no announcement.  There's talk in all of the items 
about the shutdown policy about how it wasn't "likely" that Grex would 
felt it needed to shut down at all.  Why wasn't it reasonable to use 
"likelihood" in evaluating the possibility of legal effects against Grex 
if the law *did* take effect?  

To cover the unlikely possibility of the law taking effect, and the 
further unlikely possibility that if it did, there might have been 
consequences for Grex if it did, the Board voted to shut down the 
system, and then because it was all so unlikely, the Board decided not 
to inform most of those who would be affected.  Isn't this pretty 
screwy?

The Grex coop conference is not the place for correcting the Michigan 
State Legislature.  I disagree with what they did, but that does not 
excuse the Grex board from being reasonable and doing what it should.

response 29 of 73:

Jul 30 20:59 UTC 1999

I must be wierder than average here.  I was operating on the assumption
that Grex would vanish (at least for a time) if the law was upheld, at a
minimum because lots of material would need to be removed to prevent users
from being blasted for old material.  It never occurred to me that it
might stay up uninterrupted.  I think you can derive my opinion of the
board action from this.

response 31 of 73:

Jul 30 23:04 UTC 1999

   The difference, as I see it was based on our collective knowledge we
simply did not believe that we'd have to use this, but voted on it "just
in case".  Had we thought there was something of a chance, we'd have put
that in.

   For me, it was a remote enough chance of this happening that I was
comfortable with doing it this way.  Had I thought there was a real chance
of it going the other way, I would have put the announcement in, myself.

   But we know from experience that when we put alarming notices in
the MOTD we get a flurry of responses, and I really didn't want people
to misconstrue Grex's shutting down because of this law.

response 33 of 73:

Jul 31 06:17 UTC 1999

resp:28 - What do I think?  Hmm, OK, so it should have been discussed 
beforehand.  It wasn't.  A few people have apologized for that 
oversight.  As someone (Jan?) pointed out, people were busy preparing 
for the trial and such.  I think the board did the right thing, both in 
the contingency plan and in avoiding panic-inducing MOTDs.  

resp:32 - "...because you look like an idiot for doing it!" - Well said. 

response 35 of 73:

Aug 6 03:32 UTC 1999

Since I personally happen to monitor coop, I was aware beforehand that 
grex might shut down.  And if the injunction hadn't occurred, I
would have had to think about what I might be able to do to cope with
e-mail being inaccessible (yes I know that technically it was removal
of public access, but it wasn't clear that mail .forward-ing would have 
been processed, that mail would even have been accepted).  In hind 
sight, I think there *should* have been some well-worded blurb in MOTD 
about what might happen, to give forewarning.  This notion of "don't 
panic the cattle", regardless of perceived past experiences, seems to 
fly in the face of assuming that members/users are reasonable, know how 
to act appropriately to conditions.  I don't buy it, I don't accept it.

response 37 of 73:

Aug 6 04:32 UTC 1999

Lightning storms are relatively unforseeable and generally only last a few
hours.  This was forseen and could have lasted days or weeks.  It's not the
same thing.  Besides, this was a rational decision, not an 'act of God' like
a storm.

You seem to have little faith in users' ability to handle the truth.