Re: Doing something about "should remain private forever" emails
Raphael Geissert writes ("Doing something about "should remain private forever" emails"):
> So everyone knows that the declassification of -private isn't going
> to happen any time soon.
I think the declassification GR was unwise. The outcome is
predictable. I think it would be best to explicitly revert it.
The kind of fine-grained tagging and control envisaged by the GR is
far too much work.
But as a practical matter, I think that the bigger problem is that we
are sometimes discussing things on -private which ought to be in
public. We have no effective mechanism for ensuring that threads are
moved. And it's just far too easy for individual developers to do the
easy thing and perpetuate the problem.
I have a proposal, which may be unpopular, to help with that.
The listmasters would appoint some group of people whose job it would
be to determine when a discussion no longer justifies being on
-private.
These "transparency wardens" would, in such cases, do two things.
Firstly they would post an announcement (probably to -private, as it
may have to say "things about XYZ are still OK here"). Secondly they
would specify to the list software particular messages that they deem
should have been on a public list; the list software would then reject
reject all followups to those messages (by looking at References and
In-Reply-To) sent to -private. Posters would get a bounce with a
canned message inviting them to redact the quotes as necessary and
repost elsewhere.
That way, at the very least, we won't be carrying on conversations on
-private that should be in public.
In the spirit of volunteering to do the work that my proposal
requires, I'm volunteering to make needed changes to the list software
and/or to be one of these wardens (if I'm wanted, of course).
Ian.
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