Thomas Dalton wrote:
It is *not* open to everyone. That would assume everyone is able to be there 100% of the time.
"Open to" means they can access it if they want. Sure, not everyone is going to be there all the time, but they can be there at any time they choose.
[I recognise you are looking at the logic of creating logs, my response is therefore to share some personal experiences about why "open" is not necessarily open. Thanks for moving the suggestion forward.]
Sorry to labour the point but for a community to be successful it needs to be as inclusive as possible.
To be inclusive one needs to be as "open" as possible. Having an open door policy but only ever being in the office when others have left the building is not useful.
Furthremore some people cannot access it from behind their firewalls. It's not open in any sense in that situation.
In my case I *choose* not to join the IRC sessions so I agree it's open to *me*. I'm more concerned about those who are excluded from this young community.
A log solves the problem quickly, simply and easily. It's not changing any of your processes, but makes the community more inclusive.
It goes some way towards solving the problem, it's very difficult to follow conversations in logs though, so it hardly solves it completely.
I agree logs are far from perfect (as I said, I much prefer email as a medium for discussion). Nevertheless, it sure helps to be able to point to the logs 5 years later and say - that was why we thought it was a good idea. In this respect it is the conversation that is important not the decision.
An even more extreme case is:
Only recently I have been made aare of a major software foundation that is using IRC logs as evidence in a legal dispute. Admittedly this evidence would not be of use in a court of law (at least not in the UK, as I understand it), but it sure helps the lawyers decide to reach an out of court settlement. In this case there is a reasonably large amount of money involved. I bet they never thought their logs would be used for that purpose.
Personally, I would prefer it if all IRC sessions were documented (in the sense of meeting minutes) and reported to the mail list for archiving. However, that is a labour intensive process and therefore unlikely to actually happen. I'm suggesting logs as a nice middle ground that requires minimal effort (and again, I acknowledge the community is now looking at this option - thank you)
Ross