Dear friends of wikiloops,
I'll attempt to address a quite unusual topic here today, and my intention is to invite you to share your opinions with me on this - I'm aware this is not necessaryly a happy topic I'm addressing here, but I do hope you will agree it is worth being thought about.
wikiloops is a kind of digital neighborhood where new neighbours are welcomed, loose and not-so-loose friendhips are made when making music together, and I do hope most of you will agree that adding to someone elses music and listening closely to the unique way someone plays (and everyone does) creates a feeling of closeness.
One of the very few things we have untill now never adressed is how we are dealing with the unforeseeable moment when one of our "digital neighbours" dies - wikiloops does not have any function to represent that at this time.
Sadly, it does happen!
I'm usually the first to tell people that "being able to come and go as one likes" is one of the great things about wikiloops,
and I do not rush to conclusions about why someone who may have been active a while ago may not be active right now - there are zillions of possible explanations, and if you judged my own "livelyness" by the date of my last upload, you might go terribly wrong about my health state.
There are however cases in which people let me know the reasons for being absent, or in which friends of a member contact me to let me know that something happened - and with close to 50.000 members, quite a lot of things happen.
I know of several members who have been diagnosed with a variety of quite concerning health issues, have spent time in hospitals & getting treatment,
but whenever such news reach me, I remind myself that "letting Dick know" is not the same as "I want the whole of wikiloops to know", so I treat such information confidential.
So far, I have only experienced one case in which a users relative contacted us to let us know the member had passed away, and I have been undecided ever since wether it would be a good thing to add some kind of notion to that users profile so no one would wonder why there are no messages coming back.
OK, so, now that my topic of today has probably become a little clearer,
let me tell you what I'd like to ask you, and what my thoughts are.
I'm aware people rather do not think about such unforeseeable incidents, and I have no intention to force the topic onto anyone.
I had to deal with "what would happen to wikiloops if I got run over by a bus?"-scenarios (they call that the "bus factor" of a project, no joke) myself and ended up writing a twenty page manual on what needs to be done so wikiloops can be continued in that (hopefuly unlikely) case. That's part of taking care of my responsibilities as this projects host, and I'm very aware you members do not have that kind of responsibility.
If you got run over by a bus (may you be protected from that and everything else!) and would not be able to re-visit wikiloops, we would not know and hope you went on a world tour with some phantastic band -
wikiloops accounts do not get closed automaticly while you are gone, so your profile and music would sit and wait for you to return, which is not really a technical problem to wikiloops. I have no interest at all to remove such accounts, and I have seen users return after years of being busy with something else - just to make sure you know I'm not out to wipe some storage space or something.
What I would like to invite you to think about for a moment is how you would like wikiloops to treat your "digital heritage" one day, and I'd like to point you at some rather technical things we will need to keep in mind when looking for a good solution.
Things to think about:
- Since in the worst case scenario, you may not be able to inform us yourself, everyone wanting to see some kind of special way of dealing with their profile and music would need to set up some kind of "fallback" solution that would entitle someone else to give the notion.
That would need to include some kind of verification, so we can make sure the person reporting the incident is really acting on your behalf.
In the past, I have been contacted thru wikiloops user accounts where the users family managed to log in to the account with a members password, but if you do not leave any notion about your wikiloops account to anyone, then there is no way we could verify such a report was not a bad hoax, so, verification is one thing to think about.
I've actually wondered wether it would make sense to offer a one-page print-template of a document one could add to ones important paperwork to let people know they should contact us on wikiloops if something bad happened to you, and stating some hints on how you'd like to see your profile changed and/or a notice added.
- If you feel we should have such passed away members marked with some kind of extra-icon or message on the user profile, feel free to offer thoughts on how that could look.
I'd like to stay away from using religious symbols (someone proposed showing a cross and the date when someone passed away) since they may not be suitable for anyone - the least depressing display might be a sign saying "gone on tour", with maybe a mouse-over info bubble stating that a user passed away on a certain date.
Looking foreward to your thoughts on this.
p.s.
I just re-read my post, and it does have a quite technical approach on a quite sad topic. Many of you reading this will know which recent news have brought me to writing this post, and I do hope you understand why I have deliberately not mentioned one single name here. It is not a lack of personal concern at all, I hope I did not create the impression that the recent events did not trouble me.
Have a nice sunday out there, and thanks for the read :)
I'll attempt to address a quite unusual topic here today, and my intention is to invite you to share your opinions with me on this - I'm aware this is not necessaryly a happy topic I'm addressing here, but I do hope you will agree it is worth being thought about.
wikiloops is a kind of digital neighborhood where new neighbours are welcomed, loose and not-so-loose friendhips are made when making music together, and I do hope most of you will agree that adding to someone elses music and listening closely to the unique way someone plays (and everyone does) creates a feeling of closeness.
One of the very few things we have untill now never adressed is how we are dealing with the unforeseeable moment when one of our "digital neighbours" dies - wikiloops does not have any function to represent that at this time.
Sadly, it does happen!
I'm usually the first to tell people that "being able to come and go as one likes" is one of the great things about wikiloops,
and I do not rush to conclusions about why someone who may have been active a while ago may not be active right now - there are zillions of possible explanations, and if you judged my own "livelyness" by the date of my last upload, you might go terribly wrong about my health state.
There are however cases in which people let me know the reasons for being absent, or in which friends of a member contact me to let me know that something happened - and with close to 50.000 members, quite a lot of things happen.
I know of several members who have been diagnosed with a variety of quite concerning health issues, have spent time in hospitals & getting treatment,
but whenever such news reach me, I remind myself that "letting Dick know" is not the same as "I want the whole of wikiloops to know", so I treat such information confidential.
So far, I have only experienced one case in which a users relative contacted us to let us know the member had passed away, and I have been undecided ever since wether it would be a good thing to add some kind of notion to that users profile so no one would wonder why there are no messages coming back.
OK, so, now that my topic of today has probably become a little clearer,
let me tell you what I'd like to ask you, and what my thoughts are.
I'm aware people rather do not think about such unforeseeable incidents, and I have no intention to force the topic onto anyone.
I had to deal with "what would happen to wikiloops if I got run over by a bus?"-scenarios (they call that the "bus factor" of a project, no joke) myself and ended up writing a twenty page manual on what needs to be done so wikiloops can be continued in that (hopefuly unlikely) case. That's part of taking care of my responsibilities as this projects host, and I'm very aware you members do not have that kind of responsibility.
If you got run over by a bus (may you be protected from that and everything else!) and would not be able to re-visit wikiloops, we would not know and hope you went on a world tour with some phantastic band -
wikiloops accounts do not get closed automaticly while you are gone, so your profile and music would sit and wait for you to return, which is not really a technical problem to wikiloops. I have no interest at all to remove such accounts, and I have seen users return after years of being busy with something else - just to make sure you know I'm not out to wipe some storage space or something.
What I would like to invite you to think about for a moment is how you would like wikiloops to treat your "digital heritage" one day, and I'd like to point you at some rather technical things we will need to keep in mind when looking for a good solution.
Things to think about:
- Since in the worst case scenario, you may not be able to inform us yourself, everyone wanting to see some kind of special way of dealing with their profile and music would need to set up some kind of "fallback" solution that would entitle someone else to give the notion.
That would need to include some kind of verification, so we can make sure the person reporting the incident is really acting on your behalf.
In the past, I have been contacted thru wikiloops user accounts where the users family managed to log in to the account with a members password, but if you do not leave any notion about your wikiloops account to anyone, then there is no way we could verify such a report was not a bad hoax, so, verification is one thing to think about.
I've actually wondered wether it would make sense to offer a one-page print-template of a document one could add to ones important paperwork to let people know they should contact us on wikiloops if something bad happened to you, and stating some hints on how you'd like to see your profile changed and/or a notice added.
- If you feel we should have such passed away members marked with some kind of extra-icon or message on the user profile, feel free to offer thoughts on how that could look.
I'd like to stay away from using religious symbols (someone proposed showing a cross and the date when someone passed away) since they may not be suitable for anyone - the least depressing display might be a sign saying "gone on tour", with maybe a mouse-over info bubble stating that a user passed away on a certain date.
Looking foreward to your thoughts on this.
p.s.
I just re-read my post, and it does have a quite technical approach on a quite sad topic. Many of you reading this will know which recent news have brought me to writing this post, and I do hope you understand why I have deliberately not mentioned one single name here. It is not a lack of personal concern at all, I hope I did not create the impression that the recent events did not trouble me.
Have a nice sunday out there, and thanks for the read :)