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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 393 responses total. |
cross
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response 161 of 393:
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Jan 7 21:55 UTC 2004 |
Regarding #149; He was referring to me. This does not induce me to want
to get him an anchovy pizza, though.
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jep
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response 162 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:06 UTC 2004 |
I had entered responses in Valerie's items, too. Valerie's items were
linked to parenting, Misti; you could only unlink them from your
conference. You couldn't actually delete them from Grex.
Some of my responses were about topics that weren't exactly about Arlo
and Kendra. There were no other active items in parenting while
Valerie's items were there. Valerie brought up Asperger's Disorder
last summer, and since I am interested in the topic as well, I created
an Asperger's item in parenting. It never got off the ground; the
discussion all stayed in Valerie's item.
I don't mind much that my responses got deleted with the rest of those
items. I doubt if I ever said much of any value.
However... now that the staff has granted Valerie the right to delete
items she entered, I think there *has been* a policy change, and others
who want their items deleted should be able to have them deleted as
well. The staff shouldn't be debating it internally, or asking the
Board, or waiting on the outcome of discussion or a user referendum.
Not now. The policy *has* changed.
I think, by not accommodating user requests, the staff is in danger of
making a second policy change. Staff members are Special People; above
the rules.
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jep
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response 163 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:14 UTC 2004 |
Valerie's action changed a lot of things by a large amount. I am
positive she didn't intend that. I am positive there was no bad
intent. Things have gotten out of hand.
I do not mean to be on the side of those who are shrieking, "She broke
the rules! Corruption!" Valerie is not corrupt. I hope this won't
end her contributions as a staff member. She's a very valuable staffer.
I think Valerie made a big mistake. It's just a mistake, but it has a
lot of consequences. We all need to learn from it and move on. I know
what I wrote in resp:162, but nevertheless, the most important thing is
going to be for Grex to not panic or overreact, and for Grex to find a
reasonable course and stick with it.
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naftee
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response 164 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:24 UTC 2004 |
I find it interesting that valerie is worried that some people in the baby
diary items had quoted her verbatim and as such, their posts should remain
purged. However, she has neglected to mention that on the m-net agora
conference, some of her work remains, probably in verbatim form! Of course,
she can't bring that argument over there, because it would clearly be seen
for what it is: censorship.
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cross
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response 165 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:35 UTC 2004 |
Regarding #162; Just to clarify, staff didn't grant Valerie any extra
`right'. She acted on her own, outside of the rhuebric of staff.
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jep
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response 166 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:45 UTC 2004 |
re resp:165: If that's the case, then there's no need for a debate.
The items need to be restored. It couldn't be more straightforward.
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albaugh
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response 167 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:45 UTC 2004 |
> Actually it would be abuse of power. Just because a fw has the ability
to delete an item, doesn't mean that they can when they need to. <
First of all, does the fw have the *power* to kill an entire item at any time?
If the answer is "yes", then they *can* "when they need to". If this is the
case, then it's a matter of *policy*, what *should* the fw do. Is there
anything documented along these lines? If so, where can we find / read it?
If not, it's probably high time to document something. If there is something
already documented, that could be updated if grexians though it should be.
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albaugh
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response 168 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:51 UTC 2004 |
Re: #166 - Whoa fella! So far I haven't seen anyone pointing to something
clearly documented that says when staff / fw's can / cannot kill entire items,
that is, policy-wise. It sounds like at least certain staffers, and certain
fw's, could kill an item if its enterer requested it. Others might disagree,
but it is not cut-and-dried that such a killed item must be restored.
In this case, the item-enterer was also staff, so she wasn't deleting someone
else's item without permission. My main complaint there is that she didn't
try to work with the conf. fw's first.
Since there is no established policy, I don't agree that it's
"straightforward" that the items must be restored. I think that the focus
should be on establishing / updating a policy to handle this situation in the
future.
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willcome
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response 169 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:54 UTC 2004 |
(entrant.)
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cross
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response 170 of 393:
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Jan 7 22:55 UTC 2004 |
Given the lack of policy, I still think we can say it was in violation of
the spirit and stated intentions of grex. Whether it can or should be
undone is another matter.
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other
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response 171 of 393:
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Jan 7 23:06 UTC 2004 |
Frankly, Grex is not a closed circle, and Valerie has known that all
along. There is no such thing as a guarantee of privacy or even
obscurity for anything we choose to post in any public conference,
so I am at a loss to understand (without having read either the
diaries or their parodies) the urgency which necessitated her
actions.
As I understand it, FW's have the ability to remove items, but are
encouraged to use it rarely, with proper observance of the law being
a primary goal and protection of the free speech rights of Grex
users as a secondary.
If I were an FW/cfadm/staff member asked to remove these items,
based on my understanding of the responsibilities, I would respond
by removing only Valerie's text from the items, and out of respect
for her ownership of her posts, I would also remove any direct
quotes of her text from the posts f other users in those items (with
appropriate indications of excision left in their places). That is
as far as I could see properly exercising the powers of
administration in honoring the request for retraction, and that is
what I would have expected Valerie to do on her own. I have no
doubt that if those were the limits of her actions, she would have
been satisfied and she would be receiving full support and backing
from all other staff.
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naftee
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response 172 of 393:
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Jan 7 23:13 UTC 2004 |
re 171 Great, nice, thanks for your opinion on what you would have done in
those hypothetical situations. But we need to move towards a decision.
I think jep's proposal is a great idea. A lot of stuff from those items can
still be read on M-net.
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mynxcat
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response 173 of 393:
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Jan 7 23:36 UTC 2004 |
I agree with other. That's what should have been done. In this case, I think
that the items should be restored, and the specific responses deleted.
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jmsaul
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response 174 of 393:
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Jan 8 00:00 UTC 2004 |
I also agree with other.
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cmcgee
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response 175 of 393:
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Jan 8 01:14 UTC 2004 |
My comments can be left out as well. Or else make sure that I have the ability
to delete them myself.
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gull
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response 176 of 393:
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Jan 8 02:13 UTC 2004 |
Re resp:143: I wouldn't feel the same about this if valerie had asked
the fairwitness or another staff member to remove the items for her.
Maybe there should be a policy that staff members ask another staff
member to act when staff powers are needed to do something that affects
them personally as a user. I think it should be clear when people are
acting as staff and when they're acting in their own interest as an
ordinary user. Valerie overlapped the two, using her privilages as
staff to benefit her personally, and that's my main objection to what
happened.
Re resp:163: You may feel valerie made a mistake, but she doesn't seem
to feel that way.
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bhoward
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response 177 of 393:
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Jan 8 02:21 UTC 2004 |
Wow. What a difference a day can bring...should have known better than
to go to bed before reading through the responses and weighing-in.
First, to the extent my view in this matters, I don't and won't support
calls for Valerie's resignation. I don't think she should have removed
the baby diary discussions the way she did but as the range of views in
this item show, there is definitely room for interpretation and argument.
I reject the conspiritorial assumptions and mean-spirited polemic used to
describe what was at worst a mistake aggravated by understandable emotion.
It is funny how the people quickest to express disproportionate outrage
and call for staff resignations have typically been those that have
made the least positive contribution to grex and don't even come close
to meeting the standard of perfection they would require for staff.
Moving on...
Valerie's baby diary ceased being hers when the first person other than
her responded to them. Arguments that they were private information
don't make sense to me considering they have been publicly available
for the years since first posted and could well have been copied at any
point since. In fact, we know they were, in quote or parody form
on m-net.
We give people the ability to remove their own words on grex. While in
some ideal world, I prefer that history remain immutable, I recognize that
search engines and effectively permanent online records have shifted the
balance of things rather against personal privacy and keeping a reasonable
shelf life on the impact of one's words. So we changed grex's rules to
allow scribbling to level the playing field a bit.
(Btw, I actually don't like scribbling very much for another reason; I
remember the chaos and social damage caused on the well when Tom Mandel
did a mass scribble of all his words from all the Well conferences in
which he had ever participated. As it is said there, "You own your own
words. ..." but it is also true your words form part of a tapestry and
an individual's threads are removed, some of the larger fabric unravels.)
But what someone else writes, belongs to them and it is their decision
under the current policies whether to scribble them. Not someone elses
just because they happened to have entered the item or because they
think their personal judgement is sufficient to make the call.
If Valerie or others wish to remove their own words from an item, it is
their choice but they need to individually make that decision and take
action themselves to do so. If technical reasons prevent folks from doing
that (can you scribble your own response if someone has frozen the item?
Don't know...), we ought to provide a tool, change picospan or define
clear policies for fw/cfadm assisted deletions to work around that.
So I think the baby diary items ought to be restored sans whatever of
Valerie's responses she's wishes to have deleted.
Eric you mentioned:
"I would also remove any direct quotes of her text from the posts f
other users in those items (with appropriate indications of excision
left in their places). That is as far as I could see properly
exercising the powers of administration in honoring the request for
retraction, and that is what I would have expected Valerie to do on
her own."
I agree with much of what you has said but think you go too far
in asking fw/cfadm's to start rewording other folks responses. If I
quote someone else in my response, well, they said it in a public forum,
and it is my words that are stating it back at them. Sorry they decided
to retract their own words, but that doesn't give them any right to
retract mine.
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naftee
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response 178 of 393:
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Jan 8 02:38 UTC 2004 |
re 177 Someone mentioned a conspiracy? Where?
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cross
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response 179 of 393:
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Jan 8 02:58 UTC 2004 |
I am in complete agreement with bhoward. Well said. Very well said.
Btw- another problem with deleting quotes is the level of granularity
one goes to in doing so. If someone quotes whole paragraphs of text,
it's easy. If someone quotes a sentence, less so. If one quotes a phrase
or handful of words, it's almost impossible to excise them and remain
faithful to the other author's intent. So, what's the cutoff? This,
like restriction of freedom of speech, is one of those instances where
it's really better to do nothing instead of risking doing something wrong.
An aside: the mnet parody only grew when Valerie added to her baby
diary here. Since Valerie had already more or less moved the diary away
from grex at the time Jan discovered the parody on mnet, it was already
starting to be the case that the mnet item was dying. I think it's a
given that no one over there is going to delete anything in that item,
but it's run its course. So, I *do* have to wonder what the point of
deleting the diary here was; there was no new `fodder' to canibalize
over there, and what was there wasn't going away. So what difference
did removing the baby diary from grex make?
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cmcgee
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response 180 of 393:
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Jan 8 03:13 UTC 2004 |
I like the idea that instead of changing Grex's flexible policy for fws, that
we have staff not be user/staff simultaneously.
I would not like to see fws "kill" power removed. In fact, if Valerie had
asked Misti to kill the items, and Misti had done so, there would have been
no violation of policy.
So, I think the only error Valerie made was in short-circuiting a process that
Misti would have done anyway.
If you want to control staff behavior, change the staff-behavior policy, not
the fw policy.
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gelinas
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response 181 of 393:
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Jan 8 04:47 UTC 2004 |
Some day, I will try to re-read this entire item, to better connect people
with their thoughts in my mind.
For now, a few quick commments:
It's really too bad Mary never experienced Confer on MTS.
Marcus has very different ideas from Bob Parnes, and he left out some
things that Bob included when he tried to "Do Confer better than Confer".
Authors' deleting their items was, apparently, one of those things Marcus
disagreed with Bob about.
The rules, and culture, on m-net are very different than the rules
and culture on grex. It is very dangerous to try to apply m-net rules here,
just as it would be to try to apply grex rules there. It's not going to
work, and people are going to get angry if folks insist, either way.
I *know* that the cultures are different, and I'm still new to this
one (even after four years of active participation), so I tend to check
and double-check before acting. Valerie has been around a long time.
I expected her to be attuned to the culture and expectations here, and so
I'm very surprised to see the wide divergence of opinions on and memories
of tradional practices and policies.
Where I come from, authors' deleting items is accepted. I *thought*
it was here, too. I'm now discovering differently.
Live and learn. :)
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cross
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response 182 of 393:
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Jan 8 05:07 UTC 2004 |
Joe, even outstanding staffers like Valerie can do things they may not
do otherwise when under the sway of strong emotions. I can't think of
much a mother wouldn't feel stronger about than her children.
Then again, Valerie says she did it in a calm state, and who am I to
disbelieve her?
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gelinas
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response 183 of 393:
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Jan 8 05:21 UTC 2004 |
My real point was that even long-term members of the community have different
ideas of what the underlying philosophies and resultant policies are.
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cross
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response 184 of 393:
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Jan 8 06:00 UTC 2004 |
Roger that, Staff Sergeant.
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gelinas
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response 185 of 393:
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Jan 8 06:13 UTC 2004 |
<grins>
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