[tei-council] Setting up read-only access to TEI Council list?

[Gabriel BODARD]

I agree with both Piotr and Martin's positions: that's exactly what I 
was trying to say by pointing out that setting up a parallel read-only 
email list was just like subscribing people to the Council list itself. 
(And makes me just as uncomfortable.)

I get the point about open government and all that (although that 
argument would apply much more aptly to Board than to Council, I 
contend), but we are open. It's one thing to say that all our 
discussions are archived and publicly accessible--and that some people 
do quite actively read the archives regularly--quite another to have 
potentially dozens of people receiving each email in their inbox in real 
time. I just don't see the point of it--if it were a sufficiently widely 
interesting conversation, we should being having it on TEI-L, shouldn't 
we? (And maybe a few of conversations that take place on this list 
should be on TEI-L...?)

Now if someone wants to set up a web-scraper on the TEI-Council archives 
and turn it into an RSS feed, and send each item in that feed to a 
separate email in their inbox, that's their look-in, and I have no 
objection to it. But inviting people onto the list in this way seems 
excessive, and not any better practice or especially pointful. And 
really the point is that a lot of what we talk about here is 
administrivia, effectively. The point of having a council list is that 
there's a small group of people who've committed to being happy to 
receive lots of emails on sometimes technical sometimes trivial topics 
and respond to them as appropriate. As Martin says, knowing that an 
email exchange is going to fill the inbox of up to a dozen people is 
quite comfortable; knowing that it could be many more changes the 
flavour of it somewhat. We have conversations here that wouldn't would 
have on TEI-L, precisely because hundreds of people don't want their 
inbox to ping every time.

It's nothing to do with privilege, or secrecy, or closed-meetings, I 
think it's just comfort and courtesy and good practice that the council 
list should be populated by the council (and a few invited or assigned 
others).

I rambled a bit in the middle there. I think I should have kept to the 
first and last paragraphs above.

G

On 18/05/2012 21:33, Martin Holmes wrote:
> On 12-05-18 12:05 PM, Piotr Bański wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I think it's one thing to provide public access to e-mail archives in
>> the interest of full openness, and another to know that all the e-mails
>> we write ->to the other members of the Council<- are obligatorily sent
>> into the mailboxes of other people. This seems to me to be pushing the
>> boundaries of good practice and politeness into the zone of politically
>> overcorrect exhibitionism, and I don't like the thought of being
>> involved in that.
>>
>> I don't write to "other people", when I write to this list -- I write to
>> the Council. When I want to write to other people, I use TEI-L, or, in
>> rare and I believe justified cases, CC them openly...
>
> I must admit I felt a little uneasy myself about this, but I couldn't
> pin down why; your post has clarified it a bit for me. I also wonder
> what the likely outcomes of this might be. When someone is subscribed to
> an email list, and reading it, they will inevitably feel at some point
> that they want to get involved in the conversation that's going on. The
> only ways open to a non-Council-member would be:
>
>    - email Council members directly, and ask that their opinions be
> injected into the discussion
>
>    - take the topic over to TEI-L, and invite the broader community to
> respond.
>
> Neither of these options seems like a good outcome to me, and both would
> be likely to derail or inhibit discussions on the Council list to some
> degree. We would most likely see contentious issues being discussed more
> off-list than on, through private email, and then they wouldn't be
> archived.
>
> I think I would write differently, and probably less frequently, if I
> felt the Council list was being distributed to a larger group of people,
> many of whom I didn't know. That feels somehow different from the
> discussion being archived at Virginia, although I'm not quite sure why.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
>>
>> Thanks for considering this,
>>
>>     P.
>>
>> On 18/05/12 16:56, Gabriel BODARD wrote:
>>> Agreed. Not sure I like the idea of duplicating the list in any of the
>>> various ways suggested. If we're setting people up to be able to receive
>>> but not post, why not just make them moderated members of the existing
>>> list? It seems counter-intuitive, but it is identical in every way to
>>> what is being suggested with the "outsiders" list.
>>>
>>> Is there a technically easy way to set up an RSS feed from the archives?
>>> Easier than web-scraping, I mean, for which there must exist tools
>>> already...
>>>
>>> G
>>>
>>> On 18/05/2012 15:51, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 12-05-18 07:21 AM, James Cummings wrote:
>>>>> On 18/05/12 14:23, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
>>>>>> a) Add as a member of tei-council an address like
>>>>>> council-outsiders at lists.village.virginia.edu , which we would advertise
>>>>>> so that those interested could subscribe.  Members of that list would
>>>>>> receive messages sent to tei-council, and we would trust that they
>>>>>> wouldn't ever send a message to tei-council with
>>>>>> "council-outsiders at lists.village.virginia.edu" as the sender in order to
>>>>>> post.
>>>>>
>>>>> They could most likely be set to not having posting abilities (or
>>>>> their posts to be moderated).
>>>>>
>>>>>> b) Add as a member of tei-council some email address hooked up to an
>>>>>> email-to-RSS service and then publicize the feed URL.
>>>>>> The advantage to (a) is that it allows threading of messages, whereas
>>>>>> feeds (b) do not.  But (a) would also create an entirely duplicated
>>>>>> message archive.
>>>>>
>>>>> Wouldn't another option be to get the mailing list archived by
>>>>> one of the services which currently archive the TEI-L mailing list?
>>>>
>>>> I thought the archives were already public here:
>>>>
>>>> <http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2012/date.html#start>
>>>>
>>>> I don't see much point in duplicating the archive, unless the
>>>> alternative site has better searching and browsing functionality.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Martin
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>

-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
(Research Associate in Digital Epigraphy)

Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL

Email: gabriel.bodard at kcl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1388
Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/