I support Moritz' invitation anytime and would feel more inclined to invest energy into libtech if it cuddles up under his umbrella of related projects.
On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 01:43:06PM -0700, Yosem Companys wrote: > > If it ain't broken, don't touch the thing. "Stick with mailman" is what Actually, it is a bit broken.. the way it is cumbersome to maintain civil interaction it happens to be yet another mailing list and below the quality level of nettime, for example. > > Remind me what it is that Discourse offers that plain-text e-mail does not? It offers plain-text e-mail AND the extras that may prove useful like an easier way for non-tech people to produce structured responses. When you need to cite from several previous mails and respond to each, paragraphwise - with e-mail you have to open several reply editors and cut & paste pieces together. In discourse you mark the text passage you care to comment to and it will ask you whether you want to cite that. You can scroll up and pick the items you need to reply to. That's why in political projects it has become an instrument to get less techie people to contribute elaborate discussion items - something not so well solved by other forum packages. > - https://www.discourse.org/features > - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software) In https://structure.pages.de/convivenza the Italian Pirates condensed five years of experience in uncivil interactions and how to learn to make the civilized while keeping the freedom of speech. We found that most software does not exactly provide the functionality needed to manage flame war prevention in a way that matches sociological insights. Neither mailman nor discourse is ideal in that regard. The idea that the community can moderate itself with social scoring doesn't quite cut it. What's good sociologically is the ability and right to edit your own contributions at any time, allowing you to reword things that may be misunderstood or perceived as an attack against others. Discourse can be a great win if talented people are allowed to reorganize discussions for efficiency, moving off-topic discussion into other threads, joining threads that have actually been talking the same subject. I have been doing this a lot and the result was that whenever I wanted to reference a discussion on a certain topic, I would easily find it in the search drop-down and insert it in the ongoing discussion. This creates an interweaved web of hypertext where adjacent discussions point to each other, allowing people visiting the archives years later to reconstruct the context and maximize their absorption of knowledge. That's pretty opposite to the fire-and-forget effects of mailing lists and a great plus for rich text linkable forums. What is frequently difficult for groups getting started with Discourse is the structuring of categories, but libtech has a pretty narrow focus so that shouldn't be a problem. Another neat detail: in the Italian Pirate Party we've been offering also a Tor onion access to the platform which works reasonably well. In regards to the server placement discussion.. as long as a server runs on intel and has a Cisco or Juniper gatewaying it, I wouldn't call it secure. Still, we wouldn't and can't expect the libtech discussion platform to be safe from 5 eyes collection, so why bother so hard? Our personal privacy doesn't belong into libtech anyway. We hardly know each other and we don't have a common political strategy that we need to discuss behind closed doors. -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing the moderator at zakwh...@stanford.edu.
