[IAEP] irc logs

[Ties Stuij]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Martin Dengler <martin at martindengler.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 10:33:55AM +0545, Ties Stuij wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
>> > On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 10:28 PM, Ties Stuij <cjstuij at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> If I may summerize: after counting all the votes/opinions here and on
>> >> irc (but how can we check?), it's mostly for and no real against to
>> >> having #sugar logged.
>> >
>> > I'm curious as to how you came to this conclusion.
>>
>> Ehhm, ok. You said you disliked logging, without qualifying your
>> dislike. That didn't seem as a very strong against.
>
> Well you didn't really ask for a vote; you just said "Waddaya say?".
> People started voting, as they do:
>


>
> Note I haven't counted ambiguous votes, though I think some gave
> implicit approval[1] and some implicit disapproval[3], but I'm not
> confortable reading into those.
>
> If you want a vote, ask for one explicitly (preferably with a
> concrete-enough proposal), and then count.  I put -1, and Luke
> seemed to put -1.
>
> Martin
>
>> As for Martin he said, if I may quote:
>>
>> "I don't think the audience might understand the volume, verbosity, and
>> context-mining involved in browsing such a log."
>>
>> That didn't seem like a very strong against opinion either.
>
> Uselessness seems a good enough against to me :).  To quote myself:

Well I don't think uselessness is a good argument at all. I see the
smiley, but am unsure how to interpret it. Reality is a vast domain.
Voting -1 even though you know you can't oversee all possible benefits
for everybody involved, thereby denying them those possible benefits
just because you can't see them, seems a bit whimsical.

>> This for a public channel that can be
>> tracked by anyone if she/he wishes, so I don't really understand the
>> privacy-concerns.
>
> It's the difference between a conversation one might have with someone
> in a library where I know it's recorded, or don't.  I would behave
> differently, and I like the knowledge that someone has to care enough
> to see the backlog or save good parts of it:

Privacy concerns are valid argument of course. But an open channel is
a conversation which probably is recorded. And can quite easily be
made accessible by someone who just hasn't thought stuff through. The
analogy with real-live conversations doesn't hold that well I think.
You can be pretty sure no-one is pointing a microphone in your general
direction, transcribes it, and puts it on the web. True, you might
behave differently if you know for sure there is public logging, but I
at least have in the back of my mind that a public channel always CAN
be logged by anybody at all (Not that I care that much. My opinions
are my opinions, and they are never that profound.). And as such, I
think there's something to say for making it explicit. Also I wonder
which topics fall into the category of probably not being discussed
when they are logged explicitly but will be discussed when people know
they always CAN be logged. Especially in a channel like #sugar, which
mostly deals with programming. Also most of your concerns (if I read
them correctly) would be addressed by a strategically placed
robots.txt file. And the cautious/paranoid will probably err on the
side of caution anyway I think.


As for voting, let me tally one more time:

logging with robot.txt, without something along the lines of password
protection:
+1     Morgan Collet
-1     Luke Faraone
+1  Jameson Quinn
-1     Martin Dengler
+1 ties (if I count)
+1 bert
+1 bernie (might have plus-onne'ed on a comment though)
+1 Sebastian

As for the non-formal opinions; they are debatable. They won't hold up
in a formal dissection; we might have cross out one or two, but I
don't see why we can't take the general wind into consideration. We're
discussing a topic here, not formality, and their opinions seemed
clear enough, if not otherwise stated.

non formal (my interpretation of course):
+1 Bernie (if indeed he plus-onned on the comment)
+1 David
+1 Tomeu
+1 Greg (going out on a limb here slightly)
-1 Mel

so tallying reveals: +10, -3

Again some individual opinions are debatable, but in general to me the
outcome seems clear. But do debate my conclusion if you think the
general gist of my conclusion is wrong in your view. Sorry if it seems
I now oversimplify the discussion, but in my view the numbers above do
seem to reflect people's opinions pretty ok, and framing a conclusion
like this at this point is the only way I see to ever reaching an
actual decision.

I myself underestimated reality a bit. I thought logging would be
pretty much a non-issue, and I see now that reaching an actual
conclusion through a mailing-list over a topic like this is a pretty
hard thing to do. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

/Ties