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from the where-will-they-store-the-source-code? dept.
Chris Ball, about whom I know very little, gave a talk to the Data Terra Nemo conference on 23/24 May in Berlin. From the conference site, I gathered the following: "Data Terra Nemo is a technical conference for discussing the ideas behind systems and protocols without centralized ownership and how they impact the landscape of the Internet".
Chris gave a presentation regarding a decentralized git repository which he has dubbed 'GitTorrent'. His notes, which he describes as an 'aspirational transcript' of the talk, take the story up:
Why a decentralized GitHub?
First, the practical reasons: GitHub might become untrustworthy, get hacked — or get DDOS'd by China, as happened while I was working on this project! I know GitHub seems to be doing many things right at the moment, but there often comes a point at which companies that have raised $100M in Venture Capital funding start making decisions that their users would strongly prefer them not to.
There are philosophical reasons, too: GitHub is closed source, so we can't make it better ourselves. Mako Hill has an essay called Free Software Needs Free Tools, which describes the problems with depending on proprietary software to produce free software, and I think he's right. To look at it another way: the experience of our collaboration around open source projects is currently being defined by the unmodifiable tools that GitHub has decided that we should use.
So that's the practical and philosophical, and I guess I'll call the third reason the "ironical". It is a massive irony to move from many servers running the CVS and Subversion protocols, to a single centralized server speaking the decentralized Git protocol. Google Code announced its shutdown a few months ago, and their rationale was explicitly along the lines of "everyone's using GitHub anyway, so we don't need to exist anymore". We're quickly heading towards a single central service for all of the world's source code.
So, especially at this conference, I expect you'll agree with me that this level of centralization is unwise.
The talk continues in the first link at the start of this summary.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @08:56AM
Those who recently have been commenting on the role of the editor would do well to compare this summary with the original submission. It perhaps illustrates best the task sometimes facing the editor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:52PM
That reminded me of the credit in the Will Smith "I, Robot" flick: "Suggested by the works of Isaac Asimov".
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:13PM
(Score: 1) by McD on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:46PM
I was involved in that discussion. What happened in this article is so much "editing" as "authoring," and that's not so much a "story submission" as a "story suggestion."
Full marks to Janrinok for following up and turning it into a discussion-worthy writeup! I would consider that above and beyond the call of duty for the position of "editor."
But that said, this is actually the exact sort of thing I was talking about [soylentnews.org]. Granted, the submitter is anonymous, and submitted little more than a bare link, but it's not obvious to me looking at this that the speaker is Janrinok, and not the submitter.
Clearer attribution of who's doing the speaking is my concern.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:13PM
Thank you for your kind words. However, it is not that exceptional - we have been doing this sort of thing since day 1. We have to get stories onto the front page. Receiving a simple URL and perhaps a couple of sentences from IRC or even in a submission is not all that unusual, although we would obviously prefer to have a little more to work with. I can't quote an absolute figure, but part of our work involves rewriting submissions. Not everyone can provide something ready for the front page but there are, of course, notable exceptions. Our procedures are well documented in the wiki. There are changes being introduced to the story format to make this more clear, and they will appear as soon as we can get the software ready.
We can't throw it back for a rewrite - ACs are un-contactable (and current policy prevents us from using email for any other submitter). If you wish to attribute it to Anonymous Coward, I have no objections. He doesn't get any karma. All I did was try to put it into context and then intro the blockquote which is, by definition, a quote from the article. I don't need the attribution, but if you look at the summary you can see that I edited it.
Just out of interest, does a newspaper editor only make spelling corrections? One definition that I found [preservearticles.com] says:
... and that is what I tried to do.
(Score: 1) by McD on Monday June 01 2015, @09:56PM
No, I'm pretty sure newspaper editors exercise much greater latitude over stories from their journalists.
Bit of apples and oranges, though. A newspaper journalist has much more opportunity for give and take with the editor, has an ongoing relationship with the editor, and is paid for her efforts.
We're not a newspaper, though, we're... an internet community, let's call it. Our currency is reputation - either literally, via karma mechanisms and so forth, or figuratively, as in "I recognize that poster/submitter/editor, and tend to agree/disagree with what they have to say."
In that sense, if an editor substantially changes what was submitted, in a sense it's messing with the "currency" in which the submitter is "paid."
That said... I had no idea that the quality of submissions was so low - in terms of how much additional work was needed to post them, not in terms of subject matter. Makes me appreciate the "editors" even more - but I still think a bright line is needed to identify the speaker. Heck, it's the editor's reputation/currency at stake too!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday June 02 2015, @08:10AM
With regards to the quality of received submissions, we don't do so badly. We do receive submissions that are entirely unsuitable and, after a quick discussion between editors, they get rejected fairly quickly. We try to ensure that we don't reject without an alternative viewpoint although sometimes it is obvious that the submission does not warrant any further consideration.
There are a handful of submitters whose work is of a sufficiently high standard for it to be an almost automatic process to get it to the front page - not quite automatic, but almost. They have looked at how we format stories, have identified which html codes we use and where, and understand what we are looking for in terms of subject matter and linked source material. Some actually go the extra step to provide additional information, clearly marked as such, which we can use or not. Perhaps not surprisingly, such submissions often feature on the front page. When our backs are against the wall, having something that we can process quickly and easily tends to be an obvious choice for a busy editor.
Then there is the middle ground. These are submissions based on a topic of interest to our community, but need links tracing to the original material, or that require some reformatting (or even rewriting in some part to comply with the guidelines), or other typical editing tasks to make it suitable for the front page. This, I would guess, amounts for the largest part of our work.
But sometimes we receive a URL and perhaps a few words. This is quite understandable - if you are posting from a smart device it is not always easy to write a complete summary using just your thumbs! A URL passed to us from IRC about a news item that requires relatively prompt action would also fit into this category. As long as the balance remains as it is today, or better, we can keep on top of the task. All submissions are welcome, regardless of which category they fall in to, although we simply cannot process too many of the 'single URL and one sentence' variety and still keep the front page full.