The Admin-ing

Continuing the discussion from Discontinue Changelog, but not really:

Specifically @tim, @judytuna, and @trashHeap.

There is an admin doc on GitHub that kinda explains the other two permissions, which overlap with the trust levels; they aren’t the same things, exactly.

From https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/ADMIN-QUICK-START-GUIDE.md

Staff

Staff members are official representatives of this community. There are two kinds of Staff:

  1. Admins , who can do anything and configure anything on this site.
  2. Moderators , who can edit all posts and users, but cannot add categories or change any site settings.

Admin is godmode, as the database can be downloaded. Now, that shouldn’t be an issue, in theory. I discourage folks from using private messages, but I am under no delusion that works. Currently I’m secure with the knowledge that I personally do not read the DB.

And while I have utmost confidence in each of your competence to be an admin, I want to note there is always that little infosec voice in my head that says: do not have any more gods than needed

That said, I’d very much like to scrub my ego a little more raw, double-check backups are working, and share whatever level of access seems appropriate.

Let’s discuss! What should we do?! :slight_smile:

I like that question. Mainly because I get a sick joy out of project planning; and at the risk of stumbling into the grand information engine (which I still consider a little above my pay grade) :

What are Talkgroup’s short, medium and long term goals? Does it have them? Does it need them? Are we brainstorming them now?

Yes.

It requires a refresh with cognitive diversity. :blush:

Short: provide a common, safe space to communicate with fellow people, presuming such communication improves their quality of life

Medium: provide a system of discussing and assessing, branching, clarifying knowledge, while providing just-in-time resources to the public

Long: an archive of our lives, for future archivists to learn our lessons and create the brightest timeline; also my soul wants to create something beautiful and leave for the world

It suddenly occurs to me that Talk Group is basically a realtime real life game of Lexicon.

I wanna meditate on this for a day or so and comeback to the thread, but those are pretty good short and medium term goals. My vote would be to stick action items or milestones to those two, and then survey and see what we feel comfortable biting off. Even if it is in smaller chunks.

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This is important and I’ll respond today, short version is “I am on board”.

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This was really helpful.

I am 100% on board the Short and Long goals and 1/2 of the Medium goals.

This is the thing I fully support, but don’t feel like I have anything to contribute to. I just don’t have a drive for cataloging knowledge, other than what happens via discussion. Again, I fully support it, I just don’t think I would be of help creatively in this part. I would do my best always to help, of course.

I hope that is alright, I want to be upfront with my abilities so it’s not a surprise if I’m not hopping in, in certain areas.

I would emphasize provide. It is as important to show how and if a site like this helps others. There is a very real technical support challenge here, aside from thinking about other stuff.

I hardly edit Wikipedia, but I’d step in to keep it running, discuss policy, etc. Know what I mean? :slight_smile:

For sure, and I am 100% on board in that regard. :slight_smile:

So ive reflected on this a bit and wanna grope towards some action items that align with short term goals.

So there are a lot of deffinitions there which can imply a lot. How do we define fellow people, how do we define safe sapce. What is required for a space to be safe? I think those are important questions, but some of them are hard and some of them can wait a few breaths.

I think a common prerequisite for a lot of those questions is just clear concise explanation of what Talkgroup is and what it’s values are; and have it posted/stickied fairly prominently.

Okay, today I’m going to try to articulate where I’m coming from, because that is pretty much the driving force. This is a really great process, but also kinda emotional, personally. So we’ll go slow. :slight_smile:

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Thats the thing to. It can be a working definition, to be revised later. Heck part of the definition of talkgroup could be that its constantly refining itself.

Also while Talkgroup is birthed by maiki and will always be maiki’s in that sense. We can help with a larger/longer value statement I think.

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Still thinking and noting a lot of things about this. I will tell you a story. It will make sense.

In the meantime I wanted to share:

Magic bucket factory.

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There is a line with two ends. At one end is where Discourse begins as software, and the other end is my ideal forum software. I idea and Discourse, through careful consideration on both parties’ parts, have slowly crept towards each other. I feel talkgroup is okay as it is, and we have enough breadcrumbs to point that discussion in #meta is a quick way to fix any issues we have here. :slight_smile: