[Businessmtg] ASP Archives

Fri Nov 23 00:35:55 PST 2018

Hi ASPers,

I'm sorry that I've been AWOL so much the last few weeks. Life gets
complicated sometimes with a quick trip to San Diego to see my daughters and
grandkids, my younger daughter had breast cancer surgery, three days later I
had knee surgery. All the while the County Commissioners were trying to pass
a new ordinance that stirred up a real hornets' nest, then I was elected to
be one of the head hornets. The good news is that I'm home and both my kid &
I are doing well. 

OK, I'm the one that raised the question of the ASP server maintaining
archives of our ASP recovery meeting, thanks to another member of ASP that
is no longer with us.  Since this was my topic, I would have much preferred
being the one to present it, however I was given only a few hours notice and
it seems that moving the agenda forward is now is more important. Also, this
issue is more complex than it may seem on the surface, which means that my
intro and response is more complex. 

HISTORY:

This was never an issue, or even a question, during the first ten years of
ASP while I was the List Owner. I don't recall that archiving shares was
even an option when we started ASP. I moved ASP from one provider to another
four times during the first ten years. One of the later servers used
"Mailman" mailing list software that ASP uses today, but we did not archive
shares.

However, there was one exception when ASP's server crashed and the new
owners of the firm I'd contracted with for the service chose to discontinue
that service. So, I hurriedly moved ASP to eGroups in 2000 after ASP had
been dark for 3 days. A few months later, Yahoo acquired eGroups and began
placing advertising at the bottom of every share; that was unacceptable to
me. So, I moved ASP again to a private server that I paid for. Yahoo Groups
did then and continues to post 'archives' of all messages posted to Yahoo
Groups. My point about Yahoo Groups is that there are several other online
Al-Anon meetings that are hosted on Yahoo Groups and all of them have
archives of the shares available on the Yahoo site.

Then, in late 2005 I held a lengthy business meeting to discuss and
determine the future of ASP. Several significant group consciences came out
of that business meeting that guide ASP today. On May 1, 2006 the ownership
and operation of ASP was officially turned over to the membership and Dawn
was the first List Administrator. 

If you've been around Al-Anon and ASP very long, you may have noticed that
new trusted servants sometimes try to do things differently, often without
running the changes by the membership. That's how the ASP Archives got
started. Our first List Administrator clicked on the (YES) button on the
Archiving Options page and poof! The server has been archiving ASP shares
ever since April 30, 2006.

I'd like to remind everyone that:

            (a) there is a record of everything on the Internet. Everything.
Email included. 

            (b) that does not mean that anyone and everyone has easy access
to that info. Routine access required logging into the ASP server.

            (c) for example, even if we turned off the ASP Archives, record
of ASP shares will still on the server, but access would be highly technical
and likely require the services of the firm owns the server that ASP rents
to host ASP.  

            (d) there is always the possibility that the records of the
server could be subpoenaed by the courts as evidence of some civil or
criminal trial. This could happen whether the server maintains readily
accessible archives or not. 

            (e) yes, it could happen that a member's alcoholic could access
the archives. However, that is highly unlikely, especially compared to the
far more likely situation where an alcoholic accesses a member's shares on
their computer. That does happen on occasion and has nothing to do with
archives. 

Moving on . . .

ARCHIVES - what are they good for?

Well, they do provide a resource for members to read during times of need.
Since the archives are searchable, a member struggling to deal with
depression, divorce, children, DUI, legal stuff, etc can search the archives
for shares that include a key word. Consider the difference between the
depth of responses to a member posting a request for help regarding divorce
that yields a half dozen responses (10 minutes of reading at most) and
several hundred hits in the archives that take several hours to read. 

On occasion, I've used the archives to research something that occurred way
back when. For example, sometimes we need to know when a member joined ASP;
we can figure that out from the archives. Another example, the leadership
might be dealing with an issue, and the archives can help clarify what
happened in a similar situation in the past. 

And lastly, some folks just might like to read old shares. I read some posts
here in the Business Meeting critical of members reading archived shares and
that current shares were enough. That may be true for them, but I've learned
to not be critical of why people chose to go to this kind of meeting or that
kind of meeting, or to share or not share, or whatever. That's not to say I
don't have my own opinions on that - I definitely do. It's just that I chose
to let others take their own paths, whether it's a path I chose or not, or
even a path I find little value in for myself. 

TECHNICAL SIDE:

The maintenance of the ASP Archives requires zero support from the trusted
servants. The server does this automatically, or doesn't do it depending on
which setting is selected. 

As for the workload of the server itself? Servers maintain logs and records
of everything. That's the nature of the beast. Maintaining the archives is a
non-issue in terms of server workload. 

OTOH, Jerry mentioned that we have over 2,100 members of ASP. Actually, we
have a mailing list of 2,156 email address that our server sends every ASP
share to. History has shown us that most of those email addresses are
inactive. No one reads them anymore. Just like in face-to-face meeting, most
new members stop going to meetings very quickly. This is especially true
because our greeters have often encouraged new members start a new Gmail
address to join ASP with. For many, it is a lot easier to just stopped
reading anything sent to that address than it is to unsubscribe from ASP.

Now, consider that our server is sending an average of 42 shares each day to
2,156 members. That's 90,552 emails per day. Close to 3 million in a month.
I don't know what our server's capacity is, but I do know that years ago we
shared a server with other online Al-Anon meetings and that server would
nearly grind to a halt on occasion. It could take hours for a share to get
posted. I'd call our provider and they'd do some work on the server, and I'd
go to work clearing out the dead email addresses. Maybe our server can
handle this capacity, and more, easily but I wonder why we need to
perpetually send shares to people that are no longer members of ASP in any
way, except that once upon a time they subscribed and we put their email
address on our mailing list. 

Now, having said that in response to some statements and questions, this is
a topic for another day. 

ANONIMITY

Anonymity is obviously a large part of our program, so there are some that
may consider this an anonymity issue. I get that, however, ASP is very
different than a face-to-face meeting. See, in a f2f meeting, everyone in
the room gets to actually see everyone else in the room. We know what they
look like, how they dress, and more. We know what kind of car they drive,
probably what town they live in, or even what house they live in. We
probably know their phone number. It's not unusual at all for at least some
of us to know who their alcoholic is, but we actually know their alcoholic.
We may know where they work, and so on. 

Someone mentioned tape recording a face-to-face meeting. While our regular
weekly face-to-face meetings are recorded, it is common for speaker meetings
and panel discussions to be recorded. I know there are copies of
face-to-face talks that I've given on the Internet. There are also video
tapes of Al-Anon skits that I've been in. 

It's important to understand that anonymity is not about anonymity inside
the fellowship, it is about being anonymous outside of the fellowship.

Tradition 11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than
promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press,
radio, films, and TV. We need guard with special care the anonymity of all
AA members.

So, I talked about anonymity inside a face-to-face meeting, but what about
here in our online meeting, ASP?

You are as anonymous as you would like to be. Period. 

Members are free to use pseudonyms so we don't know your real name, unless
you tell us. We don't know where you live, unless you tell us. We don't know
who your alcoholic is, unless you tell us. We don't know how educated you
are, or what kind of job you do, or ??????   Unless you tell us. 

If anonymity is really important to you, then don't tell us anything you
don't want us to know. 

In other words, I don't believe that the anonymity argument is a water-tight
argument here.

DISCUSSION.

Lastly, I'd like to say something about discussion during the KBDM process
<http://asp-afg.org/members/kbdm/> .  The goal of discussion in an Al-Anon
business meeting is to reach substantial unanimity in an informed group
conscience.  The key word is INFORMED. The gist of this is that the members
must be fully informed before making their decisions. What I see a lot of
members expressing their opinion, one way or the other, before we've had
much discussion. A tally of uninformed opinions is not an informed group
conscience. 

Our KBDM process speaks to this rather directly when it says:

===========================================

VI. Posts to the discussion

Members are asked to read ALL the new posts before posting a response or
question. Please do NOT ask questions that have already been answered. A
post may be:

A. A question;

B. A statement of fact-if so please provide supporting evidence;

C. A statement of Al-Anon principle-if so, please quote the applicable Step,
Tradition or Concept;

D. A statement of experience-if so, please say so and describe the Al-Anon
experience in our usual way: what it was like, what happened, and what it is
like now;

E. A statement of opinion-if so please be clear that it is your opinion and
not a statement of fact or Al-Anon principle.

===========================================

I would hope that we'd see a lot more of A thru D than E during the early
stages of our discussions. 

CONCLUSION:

I've tried to explain the history of our archives as well as the some of the
different perspectives - without imposing my personal opinions on whether we
should continue to maintain an archive or not. Frankly, I could go either
way, but I would really like to see more discussion of the issues involved. 

Love and SERENITY,

Steve