>From a communication systems design point of view (using the psychological definitions and not technical definitions of those words), what's important in these choices is that the privacy expectations of the people using a medium are not violated. If people expect a communication to be private or restricted to people-known-to-be-in-channel, then they are more likely to say things that they only want those people to know. If people know and/or understand as they enter a communication channel that it will be published, spiderable, and _read_ by others, they will adjust their behavior accordingly. In particular, they may move their more private communications somewhere more private.
IRC has traditionally had both kinds of channels. Each channel has had the ability to do logging, even if not all channel communities necessarily knew that. I at least think there's value in both kinds of channels. I'd encourage "work" channels (as in places where decisions are good to document, refer back etc.) to have a discussion as to whether they want to enable logging & search etc. I'd personally vote against logging in watercooler channels. Inappropriate behavior needs to be acted upon as it happens, by people who witness it. Regardless, it's important that if a privacy change is to happen, users get appropriate notice, and, I argue, that community members (and in many ways frequent-channel-users are members of that very specific community) get a say. --da _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
