Wow.
Justice that is not loving is not just; love that is not just is not loving. Just so, dissemination without dialogue can become stray scatter, and dialogue without dissemination can be interminable tyranny. The motto of communication theory ought to be: Dialogue with the self, dissemination with the other. This is another way of stating the ethical maxim: Treat yourself like an other and the other like a self.
I had to re-post that simply for the poetry of it.
Thanks Jenny, I always appreciate your view on these issues, and I hope you can also share with other Omni Commoners some more elements of your personal experiences with online communication.
Mia,
Thanks for sharing more of your perspective. I definitely see where you are coming from.
At sudo room we encourage developing our knowledge and experience with issues concerning privacy and security in all realms: digital, network and otherwise. I think there is a lot of potential to expand these questions, experiences, and practices to the wider Omni Oakland Collective community.
I have to re-iterate what Jenny pointed out: considering that all online communications are potentially public. This is salient. Consider the implications if we remember that storing information on a digital device, passing information over a digital network, and storing information with online services (e.g. email providers) are inherently at risk to being accessed, copied, or intercepted by others, intentionally or unintentionally.
I already suggested some things we currently do to address these issues (e.g. make it clear to the public how to contact us, funneling that traffic into a more private location like helpdesk@lists.omnicommons.org).
On top of this, I'm starting to think that the issues that you have brought up can be addressed much better at an individual and community-of-practice scale, rather than flipping the "public" to "private" switch for (some) list archives. By educating each other and elevating our knowledge about communication, privacy, and security, we can protect ourselves, one another, and members of the general public (our friends, allies, comrades, and prospective collaborators among them). Here's how:
- Build Awareness of Privacy and Security
- Audit our existing communication culture, understand how and why we communicate the way we do.
- Research best practices and parallel examples in other (especially similar) communities.
- Learn about the risks associated with various forms of communication
- Identify ways to improve our practices to ensure our communications are more appropriate for various circumstances and concerns.
- Pseudonyms / Nyms / Real Names
- Reinforce the idea that we do not need to have any "real names" policy, meaning by default for communication, and for most purposes, we do not need your real name, you can share any "nym" that you prefer, even multiple.
- Encourage use of pseudonymous and anonymous communication, like an email address that is not associated with one's real name or an anonymous "comment box", respectively.
- Perhaps we can dole out @omnicommons.org addresses in order to protect users' email addresses and therefore elements of their identities?
- Use End-to-End Encryption
- Educate and encourage attempts to use secure communication using end-to-end encryption techniques. Meaning, you encrypt your message, then you provide a mechanism for your recipient to decrypt that message and read it; they encrypt their response, you use a mechanism to decrypt it, and read their response.
- There exist tools for popular communication mechanisms including:
- email
- chat
- text messaging
- phone calls
- sneaker net (walking data between computers)
- Personalize Protection
- Leverage our community's knowledge to work with folks on a case-by-case basis to address individual needs.
And I'm sure there's much more we can do.
// Matt