[sudo-discuss] [omni-discuss] email archives for list members only, except announce?
Matthew Senate
mattsenate at gmail.com
Sat Oct 4 16:33:33 PDT 2014
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 at 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
On Sat, Oct 4, 2014 at 3:25 PM, Jenny Ryan <tunabananas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 at 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 at lists.omnicommons.org
>> <whistleblower at lists.omnicommons.org> *or *leaks at lists.omnicommons.org
>> <leaks at 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 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 12:51 PM, David Keenan <dkeenan44 at 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> discuss mailing list
>>> discuss at lists.omnicommons.org
>>> https://omnicommons.org/lists/listinfo/discuss
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> discuss mailing list
>> discuss at lists.omnicommons.org
>> https://omnicommons.org/lists/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>
>
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