[Businessmtg] Saving shares

[Anne K]

I am against saving member's shares. 

As someone else mentioned, I feel that saving the shares goes against Traditions 11 and 12. Our opening states in part "Al-Anon is an anonymous fellowship. Everything that is said here, in the group meeting and member-to-member, must be held in confidence. Only in this way can we feel free to say what is on our minds and in our hearts, for this is how we help one another in Al-Anon". There is a pamphlet "Why Anonymity in Al-Anon?" that I just ordered; and a couple shares from members on the al-anon (dot) org website blog: "Understanding Anonymity on the Internet" by Tom C  and "honoring-the-spiritual-principle-of-anonymity" by Tracey S (re-printed with permission from the Forum). If the pamphlet arrives before this discussion is completed, I'll chime back in. 

If we choose to keep saving shares (which I am against) I feel ASP has a responsibility to its members to re-iterate often (daily) and in plain language that all shares are saved and can be accessed by anyone in ASP - since this is the current state. I believe this responsibility exists even though members should be aware that anything written in an email is saved forever anyway. Anyone can attend a f2f meeting or a Zoom meeting or a phone meeting and record it as well - yet we - as members - trust that does not happen. Other email meetings I've attended don't save the shares in any kind of repository like ASP does. 

My understanding is that saving shares is a 'checkbox' so it is either on or off. 

A couple years ago I went through the archive and identified my saved shares (344 of them) and requested -from the hosting company where the archive is kept - that my shares be removed.  Note that identifying shares is a tedious process. The answer I received was that this could not be done because of the number of shares - removal is a manual process - and because every time the archive is changed, it has to be rebuilt (essentially the archive is a database so removing a row causes everything remaining to be 'renumbered' or 're-keyed' for lack of a better term). 

I feel that ASP saving shares in an archive goes against our Traditions and not only should be stopped, but all the saved shares should be deleted.

Anne K
annabelina2 at gmail.com