# CivicTechTO: Guide for implementing public logs [DRAFT]

### Benefits

* **Discoverability** of your project and efforts by those outside the assumed geographic and topical areas.
* Lack of login creates a **ease of sharing conversations** through networks. Including an outside voice can be as easy as copy-pasting on your end, and clicking on their end.

### Pitfalls

* Many people, for a wide variety of understandable reasons, greatly value a certain degree of privacy. While important in both new and pre-existing online spaces, this is _especially_ important to consider if you are considering altering an existing space that had an implicit social contract and accompanying privacy expectations.

## How To

These are the tactics we recommend for entering into discussions with your group around creating public logs.

1. Announce your intention to investigate public logging.
* Do not enter into the conversation with a decision already made.
* Give ample time to respond. (1 week, depending on activity)
* Set a clear deadline (e.g. 5pm next Thurs) before which will listen for concerns. Take no action until that time.
* Use `@channel` to get everyone's attention.
* Create a straw poll using :+1: and :-1: reaction emoji.
* Communicate that this is non-binding and _not a vote_.
* Investigate _any_ :-1:s in followup conversation.
* Let people know they can DM you directly if they'd prefer not to speak up publicly.
2. Link this document.
3. Add the suffix `-pub` to the channel name. This will allow people to easily recognize when a channel keeps public logs.
4. Pin a message in the channel with a DISCLAIMER, pointing to the public logs.
* Clarify a point of contact, should someone feel unable to participate due to these logs.
5. Should an opt-out system be in place, provide a clear link to it, along with explicit instructions on how to use it.

## Opt-Out System

This section attempts to lay out a potential system by which any community member will be able to opt-out of public logs, to various degrees.

While slackarchives.io is a nice, polished hosted product, it lacks many features that seem important for consent and privacy protection.

[`slack-export-viewer`](https://github.com/hfaran/slack-export-viewer) could use this instead.

With the above tool, we could have it run nightly, and we could also allow people with varying levels of comfort with transparency to choose how they show up in logs. For example, we could design it so that they can choose from these options:

- **anonymize your identity.** scrub your name from logs, but keep a unique identifier between messages, e.g. "anonymous-user-06"
- **anonymize all your messages.** scrub name from logs and replace with a shared "Anonymous User" identity, shared by such users who select this option. e.g. "anonymous-others"
- **protect your message content.** Replace all message with a placeholder: "this message remains private at request of the speaker". This will obscure (and possibly rend useless) some conversations that you contributed to, but is the most protected.

It might also be interesting to allow people to apply the above rules from a specific date backward. This could prove helpful when folks spent certain periods within the community expecting their conversations not to be public, but are prepared to exert small amounts of self-censorship going forward (in the interest of making the community more transparent).