On 4/3/23 08:50, juan via agora-discussion wrote:
However, this document is not public, not required to be kept, and
contains only events from my time in office. When I leave, it will
probably be lost.
The thing is: logs are more important than reports, because they are
more granular and allow for history to be recorded. E.g., Janet's name
change is only reported in monthly's footnotes and have no dates.
I think we could have a shared format for logs with controlled
vocabularies for actions, flexible enough to accomodate unexpected events,
but with some process so that the vocabullary will converge at some point.
Just as an example, I can imagine having words for specific actions prefixed by the
rules that authorize them (e.g., “[2022-04-03] A<a...@example.com>
R869:registers”).
This is a really interesting idea, I'm not entirely against some parts
of it. But I think it has issues applied universally.
First, it's important to minimize the work require of officers, or the
work doesn't get done. Some of us are dedicated enough for more detailed
logs, automation, etc. But others use plaintext and it's fine.
Secondly, there's actually a serious historical accuracy risk here.
Nothing guarantees the logs are correct. Reports, however, ratify. So if
you look at the old "history" section of a report as a source for truth,
there's nothing ensuring it's actually true. The only sources of truth
are the actual emails containing actions, and ratified documents.
History logs are a secondary source and shouldn't be treated as primary.
As a note, while it's far from standardized, some officers do keep logs
in git repos. I was for a while. I'm not sure how well a universal
grammar would work. There's a nice advantage to letting everyone do it
in a way that's intuitive to em.
--
nix
Prime Minister, Herald, Collector
