On IRC logs, expectation of privacy, and posting
Hi,
There are times when people use IRC to discuss issues
important to the project, or use the immediacy of the medium to reach
a consensus, or rapidly refine a solution. Some times, it would be
useful to quote the logs of the discussion, since the rationale and
all the options discussed are easiest to convey through a full log
(editing an IRC log is a tedious and time consuming process).
Against this desire to convey useful information to people who
were not present, but would be interested in the discussion, we need
to balance the reasonable expectation of privacy that people
participating on an IRC channel may have (and this could b high,
depending on whether the channel was advertized widely, was password
protected, used Chanserv, or other means of restrictung use of the
channel to a select group of people).
I would suggest that some guidelines be established for this
(at least, a number of us on the IRC channel felt this would be a
good thing to formulate).
a) One must ask permission form all participants; quoting someone
without asking permission is considered rude.
b) Participants should be allowed a chance to clean up the record
(IRC is seen by some as a place to let down their hair, and one
would not like all that is said in an IRC channel amongst known
poeple to be more widely disseminated); this may require email
exchanges
c) after being cleaned up, one should consider whether the mater
deserves to be on -private, or not; as far as possible one should
avoid discussiong on -private what can be discussed in the open.
If time is of the essence, then one of the participants may
chose to offer a summary to the appropriate list, with a follow up of
the (possibly) massaged log for detail, if needed.
I don't think this need be policy, though, does it?
Comments?
manoj
--
Please try to limit the amount of "this room doesn't have any
bazingas" until you are told that those rooms are "punched out."
Once punched out, we have a right to complain about atrocities,
missing bazingas, and such. Meyrowitz
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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