Concur'd on all points, Matt. If people are concerned about their contributions being publicly viewable, they can post to 'confidential' or another private list - or simply have an in-person conversation. I'd like to know the particular use cases for which we would need closed, private mailing lists - because I strongly believe that open and transparent communication and documentation is essential to this project having an impact not just within our community, but for the wider world. If we intend to create something greater than ourselves, our methods of organizing, the problems we face and overcome, the things that bind or break us, our experiences of creating the space and communicating about it, all of this is vital and important knowledge we have a responsibility to share so that others may learn from, iterate off, adapt, fork, and possibly change their own corners of the world for the better, inspired by what we're doing here. 

Let's not keep our history to ourselves. Knowing that our communications are public and archivable also keeps us accountable to ourselves, each other, and the world. We should always _expect_ what we communicate online to become potentially public, and may as well just own it, be responsible for our words, and communicate with kindness and wisdom - because words are often the most powerful artifacts we leave behind for future generations to inherit.

My favorite quote on communication, in particular the debate of dialogue vs. dissemination and the way in which communication flows from internal dialogue to outward dissemination:

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.

(John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, p. 57)

Jenny
http://jennyryan.net
http://thepyre.org
http://thevirtualcampfire.org
http://technomadic.tumblr.com

`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`

"Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories."
-Laurie Anderson

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
 -Hannah Arendt

"To define is to kill. To suggest is to create."
-Stéphane Mallarmé
~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`

On Sat, Oct 4, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Matthew Senate <mattsenate@gmail.com> wrote:

David, 

I understand what you're sharing about the experiences you have had with people seeking voice and space in this project.

However, I do not believe that flipping bits from public to private on our email list archives will change that. I think Jordan's implementation of a helpdesk@ list (private archives to protect senders), and leveraging clear public-facing, private (or semi-private), and alternative communication channels (e.g. physical "anonymous comment box" by the front door) are all excellent ways to approach these situations. We should set up a whistleblower@lists.omnicommons.org or leaks@lists.omnicommons.org for instance!

Historically, I have had more than a handful of conversations with folks (some active members, other allies elsewhere in the world) who have used and read the public archives of the sudo room email lists for their information and for all of our benefit. We depend on this form of participation to continue to exist. Further, we link to these discussions in our email threads, on the wiki, and elsewhere.

We must be clear about what is public versus private, but we should challenge ourselves to make more communications available (indexed by google also means we can link to it on the public web... the structure of the web that was valuable even before search engines and the information search engines use to crawl content and formulate rankings, etc). We can also encourage search engines not to index this content to keep it unsearchable, but probably the folks who typically want to search it will be us and our community.

To me, a good number of our problems right now correspond to access, transparency, and engaging new participants. In light of these issues, there is a clear direction for us to travel in which we should value "open, public discourses over closed, proprietary processes" as well as "access and transparency over exclusivity" in order to "solve real problems over hypotheticals, while respecting visions of the future" - https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Articles_of_Association#Values

All three of us on this thread so far are sudo room members, what do you all think about these values I've shared?

// Matt

On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 2:11 PM, yar <yardenack@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 12:51 PM, David Keenan <dkeenan44@gmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to help you welcome new members - if I can get those notices, I
> will reply and copy you and Jenny.

We already have a list called "helpdesk" which is for receiving
private emails about the omni, so if we all CC helpdesk then others
know what's being done and how it's being done. Perhaps if we notice
subscriptions from somebody new, we can forward the request to
helpdesk!

Anybody interested in being part of the general email liaison /
outreach team, please subscribe. :)

https://omnicommons.org/lists/listinfo/helpdesk

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