I just wanted to chime in to thank everyone working on this, especially Jenny, for being so thoughtful and careful about these trade-offs between varying degrees of transparency and collaborative effectiveness. Sudo Room has been most exceptional in this regard throughout, even when it's been hard and when there've been no examples to follow.

I also wanted to add that I think there are also circumstances in which having a subset of people (from multi-stakeholder points of view, etc), be the trusted gatekeepers of these borderline cases of information sharing is the wisest course to maximize benefits for all. So long as the gatekeepers aren't and don't become choke-points without enough capacity to double-check and distribute oversight to affirm people's trust in the process. 

In an earlier email, I had expressed concern that this would be funneled through only one person. Someone pointed out to me that its brevity made it come off as rude, and I apologize for that.

On Feb 18, 2014, at 2:39 PM, David Keenan wrote:

And I should add, Mycelia does seem like the most useful way to aggregate info re: people, things, skills. 

Ideally what we'd want in my view for a directory Mycelia might query is one somewhat like a password manager, in which user contact info is encrypted at rest to that user even to admins (as with passwords), with fields invisiblizable to everyone else unless they are shared (not unlike filesharing). IE a privacy token could be set for specific fields, so users toggle what fields are visible to whom, or template which fields are shared by default (ie email) and which fields must be manually made accessible to specific users (ie celfone, home address, etc), or reshareable by others, etc. I realize this doesnt exist (or does it..?) but it could be useful architecture for safely sharing personal info. 

Then a way to publish/sub this db via carddav so we can have this sync to our phones.. 

I was looking into this the other day and in general the current state of the market with respect to directory services, contact mgmt & CRM still seems pretty impoverished with respect to user-settable access controls and field-specific privacy, so far as I can tell: You either add your (private) cel to your vCard, or you dont. No way to modulate down to this level. Actually I think M$ has some basic way to do this in AD-enabled GALs.. but nothing OSS-based as far as I know of, at least.





On Tuesday, February 18, 2014, David Keenan <dkeenan44@gmail.com> wrote:
This project brings up the age-old issue of transparency vs privacy. Too much 'transparency' can be bad in ways Jenny pointed out, too much privacy keeps work from being more collaborative which is endemic to the attraction of hackerspaces and collectives. In general i feel transparency is too privileged. We forget transparency often involves a loss or giving up of individual agency and control, not just a gain in centralizeable, actionable 'data'. 

I do think this tradeoff needs to be modulated and controlled at all times by individuals themselves. In my view there shouldnt be a repo where you are expected to list what you deem is your personal info, even matching names to 'nym's if ppl arent down for that. But i think matching nym's to projects would be useful, if folks are willing to document say what part of what project they are working on, as in dev environments. And perhaps people could set their own privacy settings, only share at their discretion certain info with certain people. I would participate in something like this if such privacy controls were part of it from the outset. Privacy, with respect to user-controllable visibility of personal info, needs to be thought of as a fundamental integral component, not an add-on, for every  software product.

my 2c. carry on

On Tuesday, February 18, 2014, Jenny Ryan <tunabananas@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh! I should add that we could do really interesting things with our user pages, linking to projects through tags and categories, creating portals. I'd love to spend a Today We Learned working on making our wiki more awesome, semantic, navigable (Vicky? Pete?).

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 Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Jenny Ryan <tunabananas@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Troy! Thanks for the poke!

tl;dr: Fill out your wiki userpage with current projects and contact info! Help with the membership registry (PHP) and/or mycelia (node)!


ABOUT THE DATA
a) I don't want everyone at sudo room to be able to call or text me. Fairly certain I'm not alone in this. If you ask for my number and I give it to you, we've just created trust through consent. Would like to promote a case-by-case approach to providing sensitive information, and not store it ourselves. This is why, when I asked for up-to-date membership information, I only asked for an email and a name/nym.

b) I think we should encourage people to fill out their user pages on the wiki, and include there things like projects, contact info, and public keys. We sent out a template for user pages long ago, can't remember who put it together (Marina, I think?). Here are some examples of nice user pages:
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/User:Juul
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/User:Tunabananas
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/User:Mk30
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/User:Maximilianklein


ABOUT THE MEMBER REGISTRY / SELTZERCRM
I'm running the nascent member registry at http://mycelia.cc/crm, the code for which is here if anyone wants to look and see if they can build something on top of this. It's PHP. I did a decent bit of research and this was the most viable FOSS membership registry system I could find. Soon will port it over to sudoroom.org and push to Github (hopefully tomorrow). I've been asking for help at the meetings as it would be great to have more people who want to work on this, but it needs to happen so I'm not waiting around for a team to form.


ABOUT MYCELIA
The goal of Mycelia is to create a decentralized database for documenting projects, people (skills) and objects between hackerspaces and also matchmaking between them. Pub/sub [publish / subscribe] model encouraging folks to have concrete projects about which they publish updates, or otherwise be a subscriber consuming the updates of others :)

Unfortunately, I can't code it myself and Marc's busy with sudomesh and freestore. What's up on Github is essentially Labitrack (the QR-code sticker inventory system we're using at sudo) converted into NodeJS and LevelDB. It's definitely a priority project, but not #1 right now. CC'ing substack in case he's interested in this project.


Cheers,
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss