2008/9/9 River Tarnell <river(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: Yep. IRC is a place to talk about things and clarify thinking, sort out ideas, etc. Solid decisions should be on the wiki. The mailing list is somewhat between the two and IMO is often good enough for rough consensus on noncontroversial stuff. - d.

Thomas Dalton wrote: Not sure if you missed any or not, but a suggestion/question... Is there a log of IRC discussion? That can help with the effort of answering questions over and over again. Ross

Thomas Dalton wrote: Yes, I agree IRC logs have problems, in fact this is another reason why I, personally, don't like them. Nevertheless, transparency is everything and in my experience having logs available minimises conspiracy theories (which are inevitable in any succeful community). Would it be possible for someone to set up a log bot (or whatever) on the IRC channel. Ross

2008/9/9 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>: If we're talking about #wikimediauk, I see no problem with regarding it as a public channel with officially logged discussion (and this prominently noted). Mind you, people would be bored senseless with most of it. Sean, how would we make Freenode OK with this, do they have rules about logged channels? - d.

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 2:26 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: If the topic states the channel is logged, we are allowed to log it. We just have to make people aware. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

I do appreciate this desire to have things logged and have everybody knowing exactly what everybody else is doing. Unfortunately, I don't think it's tenable in the long term. Once the chapter is officially created and incorporated, there are two types of decisions that will typically be made: 1) Decisions concerning everbody which will be made at the AGM, typically by a vote (and a person's reasons for voting one way or another may very well be kept private). AGMs are going to have minutes which are typically made available to members, and don't need IRC logfiles 2) Decisions concerning the day-to-day business of the chapter, which are typically made by the board (or an executive subset of the board) without requiring input from the members of the chapter. Logs aren't helpful here, because decisions may be made internally by the board members (although an explanation might be requested by the community). The only time IRC logs are going to be useful as a tool for tracking and understanding decisions is in this time right now before the initial board is elected, because they will be making most decisions (with possible input from the community) until the first AGM. Trying to mandate all sorts of solutions involving bots and wikis and IRC logs is just not worthwhile because they're usefulness is going to be very short lived. --Andrew Whitworth

Please read what i wrote about 10 minutes ago. Let me suggest the most viable solution. It may be advisable to allow public logging, but I highly doubt that people are going to read pages and pages of text and look through logs that could be hours of conversation, depending on the activity in the channels. The suggestion i would like to make is to have continuous logging of the channel. Then as and when discussion occurs, a note can be left on the meta page stating briefly what was discussed and if anything come from that discussion. Logs can then be requested on that discussion as and when it is needed. We could get a bot to do the logging and then simply have someone call up the logs as and when is needed. _________________________________________________________________ Discover Bird's Eye View now with Multimap from Live Search http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354026/direct/01/

This discussion isnt just about board meetings. This is also decisions made as a community. I shall repost here again what i said: Let me suggest the most viable solution. It may be advisable to allow public logging, but I highly doubt that people are going to read pages and pages of text and look through logs that could be hours of conversation, depending on the activity in the channels. The suggestion i would like to make is to have continuous logging of the channel. Then as and when discussion occurs, a note can be left on the meta page stating briefly what was discussed and if anything come from that discussion. Logs can then be requested on that discussion as and when it is needed. We could get a bot to do the logging and then simply have someone call up the logs as and when is needed. _________________________________________________________________ Discover Bird's Eye View now with Multimap from Live Search http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354026/direct/01/

Thomas Dalton wrote: It is *not* open to everyone. That would assume everyone is able to be there 100% of the time. A log solves the problem quickly, simply and easily. It's not changing any of your processes, but makes the community more inclusive. Ross

Thomas Dalton wrote: [I recognise you are looking at the logic of creating logs, my response is therefore to share some personal experiences about why "open" is not necessarily open. Thanks for moving the suggestion forward.] Sorry to labour the point but for a community to be successful it needs to be as inclusive as possible. To be inclusive one needs to be as "open" as possible. Having an open door policy but only ever being in the office when others have left the building is not useful. Furthremore some people cannot access it from behind their firewalls. It's not open in any sense in that situation. In my case I *choose* not to join the IRC sessions so I agree it's open to *me*. I'm more concerned about those who are excluded from this young community. I agree logs are far from perfect (as I said, I much prefer email as a medium for discussion). Nevertheless, it sure helps to be able to point to the logs 5 years later and say - that was why we thought it was a good idea. In this respect it is the conversation that is important not the decision. An even more extreme case is: Only recently I have been made aare of a major software foundation that is using IRC logs as evidence in a legal dispute. Admittedly this evidence would not be of use in a court of law (at least not in the UK, as I understand it), but it sure helps the lawyers decide to reach an out of court settlement. In this case there is a reasonably large amount of money involved. I bet they never thought their logs would be used for that purpose. Personally, I would prefer it if all IRC sessions were documented (in the sense of meeting minutes) and reported to the mail list for archiving. However, that is a labour intensive process and therefore unlikely to actually happen. I'm suggesting logs as a nice middle ground that requires minimal effort (and again, I acknowledge the community is now looking at this option - thank you) Ross

Thomas Dalton wrote: Because the future should be informed by the past and in the future the community will not be made up of the same people it is today. Ross

Thomas Dalton wrote: Nobody is *demanding* anything. We are expressing an *opinion*, and in some cases making requests or proposals. Some of us have a great deal of experience in building truly sustainable charities around open source projects, we are trying to share that experience. Contributing experience *is* a valuable contribution and takes time out of our day to provide it. I'm sorry that such a contibution is not fully appreciated. Ross