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I see two big issues with forums: centralization and requirement
of participation.
With a mailing list I always see new content passively as it
arrives in my mailbox, I get to the discussion when I can and it's
in a place I can easily check together with other stuff I check. A
forum requires direct paritcipation - you need to actually go
there and visit it, check it regularly for new content, etc. and
it'd still be easy to miss or get lost in tons of messages.
There's more thought going in emails than any forum, ever, IMO.
Centralization is an actual worry - the forums need to be
maintained by someone; someone who has full access to all its
contents, the users' private messages, etc. That's pretty
dangerous as it could be very easy to remove opinions that the
maintaner(s) don't like, silence opposition or even change or fake
messages. With a mailing list everyone has all messages at all
times, plus there is an archive, and anyone can independently
check that they are receiving the same messages that they are
actually writing. It's also way harder to silence someone's
opinion, especially without notice.
Just something to think about,
Amunak
I mean,
that's probably just because we're discussing
it on the mailing list. So we don't usually get the
opinions of anyone who isn't masochistic enough to
subject themselves to this daily. The result? Echo
chamber.
Somebody who would leave over meaningful progress
and won't consider using something other than mutt
or Emacs for communicating with the project isn't
that much of a loss.
There is nothing that can't be resolved in a forum
by trivial amounts of moderation and a reCaptcha.
The way I see it, as long as we stand a chance to
attract new users to the project in greater numbers
than is possible under the status quo, the old
guard's sensitivities can be disregarded.
I'd rather see us succeed at reaching people.
On 2017-12-31 21:21, vv AT cgs.pw wrote:
You've missed the results of the last few
times
that has been discussed. There are people here
who make it quite clear that a mailing list is
all they will accept and they will leave if we
change that.
A forum needs to be maintained, which is a problem,
I will be overrun with spam in a few days otherwise.
Personally I prefer and appreciate the benefits of
a forum, but the general consensus is different here.
Also, the proposal and consequent test site, for
a system that does a parallel forum and mailing list
where users can chose one or both and not miss anything
has recently failed miserably. I will also point out
that we have a perfectly good forum that was set up
the last time forums were discussed. I put a lot of
effort into it at the beginning but many members
boycott it. It's just not going to fly.
Sorry about the reality check. :)
Regards,
Ole
re new here. That discussion comes up frequently
and you apparently have missed
On Sun, 31 Dec 2017 19:55:56 -0500
gitgud AT tfwno.gf wrote:
The best thing that could happen is if
we abandoned the
mailing list completely. A forum could provide for better
organization of threads, improved accessibility, the
ability to pin and prioritize important conversations and
announcements, and still provide a legacy interface for
email updates on conversations that are opt-in rather
than the baseline requirement of participating in
governance decisions and staying up to date on internal
affairs.
On 2017-12-31 19:37, Rouben wrote:
> I’m afraid I cannot comment on most of the items gitgud
> mentioned, however, one thing I will agree on is the
> fact that mailing list voting can be problematic.
> Obviously, it has worked for years, however, it also
> has the potential to become contentious in certain
> situations as we’ve all seen.
>
> Therefore I want to float the following idea by the
> members of the list...
>
> 1. We get a proper online voting system. I mean a
> proper system, not something we can cobble together
> from existing code that does something similar... I
> mean a mature, supported system.
>
> 2. I am personally in favour of going with a commercial
> system for the following reasons:
>
> a) it will a third party system, not operated by any of
> our members, and will therefore be “impartial” vs. if
> it was operated by an OpenNIC member.
>
> b) a commercial system will most likely require some
> sort of payment. This financial obligation should be
> fronted by those calling the election as a sign of good
> faith that they are serious.
>
> I know of one we’d used at work for student council
> elections, called simplyvoting.com [1] that charge per
> election $200US per 250 registered voters (how many
> members do we have?) There are countless others, I am
> just providing an example.
>
> I am sure you’d be able to think of counterpoints to
> this. One I can think of is that for some members, the
> voting system fees may not be affordable for whatever
> reason... e.g. for residents of some Eastern European
> countries $200 may be closer to one’s monthly salary
> and therefore be completely unaffordable. Since OpenNIC
> is open to everyone, this may be an obvious issue. Not
> sure how to solve it.
>
> 3. Finally, for the members that are more
> democratically purist, I want to highlight that online
> voting itself is imperfect, and there are good reasons
> why a lot of governments still use an old school paper
> ballot system. This video covers the challenges:
> https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI However, a dedicated,
> purpose built online voting system is surely better
> than a mailing list (i.e. no system at all).
>
> So I am curious on these 2 topics, in principle and in
> practice:
>
> 1. What do you think of a dedicated voting system?
>
> 2. How do you feel about going with a commercial,
> third-party operated system that the proposal
> initiators would need to (potentially) pay for, say,
> per election?
>
> Rouben
>
> On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 18:26 <gitgud AT tfwno.gf>
wrote:
>
>> As is probably obvious by now, with the vote
>> for .front concluded, the
>> resolution
>> to approve .front as a top level domain has failed.
In
>> a tally of 14 YES
>> - 14 NO,
>> the motion has failed to achieve a simple majority of
>> support in the mailing list.
>>
>> There's a lot to get into, but to start, I will fully
>> admit that I have
>> been less
>> than stringent about the "official procedure" of this
>> vote. As it stands, the voting
>> rules in place are nebulous, lack comprehensiveness,
>> and leave a lot of
>> responsibility
>> to the person who puts forward the proposal. This is
>> nobody's fault, as
>> not much has
>> actually come through the mailing list in a while,
but
>> is likely an oversight that will
>> need to be addressed in the future. If I took
>> liberties during the proceedings,
>> it is because I found them necessary to take and the
>> members of the community I talked
>> with were largely comfortable with me doing so.
>>
>> There was a certain point in this vote when I asked
>> one voter, Philipp
>> Schafft, to clarify
>> an invalid vote he had cast during this vote.
Philipp,
>> a Tier One operator and key member of
>> the organization, used the opportunity to step onto a
>> soap box and claim
>> that his actions and
>> his right to them were a pillar of democratic values
>> that must not be
>> infringed, and that my
>> request that he "fix" his vote was an assault on
these
>> values. That everything I had done was
>> invalid and undemocratic, and that I had in some way
>> violated the sacred
>> "democracy" of OpenNIC.
>>
>> On a vote as contentious as .front's has been, I
>> wagered that Philipp
>> would perhaps want the opportunity
>> to think and respond more critically on the vote than
>> he had, especially
>> with his considerable position
>> in the organization. In whatever misguided way I
>> figured the decision
>> validated the request, I was
>> trying to be polite and give him an opportunity he
>> might have taken for
>> granted earlier in the vote at
>> our proverbial round table.
>>
>> OpenNIC is not a state, but an organization. Perhaps
>> in a democracy that
>> governs a nation and not
>> servers, Philipp would have a point about "freedom of
>> speech", the importance of his ability
>> to cast an inane vote, and the required inflexibility
>> of the rules in
>> place. But this isn't a parliament
>> or a state house, but a mailing list for an
>> alternative DNS. More importantly, this is an
>> organization where flexibility is not just the norm,
>> but an outright sanity measure
>> that makes working on this project
>> bearable.
>>
>> Meanwhile, despite a lengthy comment period of over a
>> months, few of the
>> users that participated in
>> the vote ever commented or suggested amendment to the
>> proposal, simply
>> showing up to voice their
>> disapproval of this addition to the proposal. Some in
>> the IRC had not
>> even read the proposal,
>> and were under the impression that the proposal had
>> nothing to do with
>> its stated objective.
>> Admittedly, this is their right; still, I can't help
>> but regard a lot of
>> the opposition and
>> even a lot of the support as "arbitrary" since it was
>> afforded scarce
>> attention before the vote
>> began.
>>
>> So with that vote chucked in the bin, the whole
.front
>> resolution fails
>> to pass. I'm sure Philipp will
>> take issue with the fact that I included a vote cast
>> shortly after the
>> stated end of the ballot in the tally,
>> but to the credit of that person, his vote was an
>> intelligible response
>> and at this stage, the ultimate and
>> final result of the vote remains unchanged. After
>> months of ramblings
>> about unbreakable Malbolge encrypted
>> domain names, talk of establishing top level domains
>> for trademarked video game brands, and a completely
>> stalled effort towards establishing or at least
>> adopting a Certificate
>> Authority, I had imagined that the
>> .front proposal backed by members of the already
>> proven team administrating the .chan top level domain
>> would be a breath of fresh air.
>>
>> I was wrong.
>>
>> I don't know what I'll do from here. But I do know
>> that I no longer have
>> the enthusiasm I did for this project
>> or the hope that I will be able to accomplish
anything
>> meaningful as a
>> member of it. I feel like I've wasted my
>> time and effort contributing to it, and that I've
>> wasted the time of others in encouraging others to do
>> the same. It was a considerable endeavor undertaken
by
>> verax and Pathore to write
>> and deploy an entirely new registration system
>> capable of supporting registration across multiple
>> TLDs including .chan,
>> and as of present, I do not feel confident that
>> their time was well spent.
>>
>> That's it.
>>
>> --------
>> You are a member of the OpenNIC Discuss list.
>> You may unsubscribe by emailing
>> discuss-unsubscribe AT lists.opennicproject.org
>
> --
>
> Rouben
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://simplyvoting.com
>
>
> --------
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> You may unsubscribe by emailing
> discuss-unsubscribe AT lists.opennicproject.org
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