Re: [Sks-devel] Social media and keyserver operators?

[Phil Pennock]

On 2012-06-14 at 02:27 +0200, someone wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-06-11 at 21:49 -0400, Phil Pennock wrote:
> > I'm thinking of creating a "keyserver operator" circle & list, both set
> > to be public.
> Is this really a good idea? I mean I'd like to see a sks-operators
> mailing list... and this list should focus on development only... but
> Twitter/G+/FB are not really open-sourceish...

[ Disclosure before I continue: I am a former employee of both Google
  and Twitter.  I own GOOG stock, but frequently disparage Google when I
  think they're making mistakes. ]

Different people have different ideas of how social media platforms
should be used.  It hadn't even occurred to me that people might view
these as platforms for development or operational discussion.  I've yet
to see any social media platform handle that style of communication
well.

This mailing-list is, in my opinion, an excellent forum for its target
use-case; we're lucky though that the sorts of people who are inclined
to run a PGP keyserver are mostly rather technically skilled already and
have been trained (by the section of society they inhabit) to search
list archives and the like before posting.  As you move away from lists
dedicated to highly technical concepts, those assumptions break down and
it becomes more challenging to encourage folks to do some homework first
before posting so that everyone else will see what they ask.

Even so, for discussion for less technically inclined participants, the
social media platforms are not currently a suitable discussion platform
for development and operations work.  At their best, they *might* equal
a mailing-list, but they don't surpass it.  The video clips and photos
aren't relevant to us.

The closest to something useful for us would be the Hangouts feature of
Google+, for incident response for a major issue, or simply to debate.
If in future years we did that, we'd pretty much have to make sure that
we get a copy of the video, post links to the mailing-list and keep the
copies around for alternative hosting if Google are no longer aligned
with our estimation of the best interests of the PGP keyserver operator
community.


So, why the social media post from me?  And why not Facebook?  Because
Facebook is focused on people you know "in real life", but the other two
are focused on discovering people with similar interests and having
discussions on those interests.  That doesn't mean that three people
discussing photography on G+ are also going to set standards which
exclude others.  But there's also more to life than photography, cats
and politics.

The folks who run PGP keyservers are people interested enough in the
social and technological intersection of concepts regarding
cryptography, identity and security that they're doing something about
it and providing a resource for the broader Internet community.  Most of
that community don't realise the importance, but folks who've been able
to, for instance, install a security update and have *reason* to be
pretty confident they're installing untampered software from ISC will
appreciate the combination of software, communities, events and
infrastructure that combined to let them find the key, establish trust
paths and end up knowing that if there are any problems, at least they
exist within the organisation releasing the software: nobody's tampered
with the content that was signed.

Myself, I think that this selection bias makes for an group of people
who are interesting *to me*.  Not to everyone.  Further, I expect that
there will be a typically broad spectrum of political leanings, belief
structures and anything else contentious to humanity.  But hey, being
able to find and talk with people about stuff *off topic* to a technical
mailing-list is good.

And if sometimes there is technical discussion between two or three
people, then it's little different from private mail exchanges which
avoid the mailing-list.  And that already happens.  Sorry if anyone
believed otherwise.  At least if folks use a sharing scope definition
which is shared and open, others can join in, or see it later.  That
can't happen with private mail without a betrayal of trust.


Are there philosophical objections to certain platforms?  Sure.  There
are philosophical objections to eating meat and some folks get pretty
strident in arguing against me.  Me?  I like a good steak.  There will
always be campaigns to switch away, but if the point is to *communicate*
with fellow human beings, then it's generally good to use the media
which other people are using.  Arguing to *restrict* free communication
between folks unless they do it in ways which someone has pre-approved
is, to me, morally repugnant.  It doesn't matter whether those
restrictions are based on "governments must be able to listen in without
judicial oversight" or "how dare you not use a platform which I
ethically approve of".  If folks using identi.ca want others to switch
to it, then *MAKE A BETTER PLATFORM AND ATTRACT PEOPLE*, don't bitch and
whine because someone dares to not use it.


In the mean-time, Twitter worked hard to keep me from putting myself in
the list, making it less useful to share, but I overcame that, and
Google+ still doesn't let a circle definition be publicly read as a
dynamic object: it's still a point-in-time sharing.  There's no
persistent public identifier for the content of the circle.  There's
also no tagging of posts for decent classification and selective
following ("I want stuff from X, except when they talk about cats").
There's definitely a lot of room for improvement here, and a lot of room
for a competitor to come along and blow them away with a better
platform.  But it needs to be better, not "has some of the features of
an existing platform, no new features that pertain to how to communicate
(only to philosophy of platform) and has none of the users".

So:
  https://twitter.com/syscomet/pgp-keyserver-operators
is a list of the 3 operators who use Twitter and let me know; one of
whom is me.  (Sometimes I let myself know things).

There are 5 people in the Google+ group; the current set is at:
  https://plus.google.com/101939425596655172174/posts/64E1ynN1EhH

-Phil

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