Groklaw: Resignation
It's a bit more like "olds" than "news", but on the 19th of Jan 2007, I officially petitioned Pamela Jones to be released my from indentured servitude as one of the volunteer Groklaw Technical Team members. 
Many reasons, but one of the principles being sheer time. Or lack thereof. I barely get enough time to handle my personal projects, let alone all the needs of Groklaw.
It's been an amazing ride being on the inside for so long. It may surprise folk to know that for most of the past three years it was just Peter/Mathfox and myself. And the Ibiblio crew naturally!
Lets see now. I found Groklaw in middish 2003 from memory. Pretty small crowd hanging out there at the time. Still on radio.weblogs.com. By the end of that year I'd inadvertently managed to get my 15 minutes of fame by helping a friend (Pamela) understand Denial of Service Attacks. Whee. That was an experience I'd rather not go through again. Not long after that I was "volunteered" with moderation privileges. It's funny re-reading those old emails. "Is it ok to zap a comment where someone called Mormon, morons?" - Dur - course it is. . Ahh. At the time it seemed a fair question. I don't think any of us wanted to be seen to be too harsh and abusive. The irony is that I doubt it would have made any difference.
There seems to be this perception that Groklaw, and by implication Pamela, will remove dissenting voices and so on at the slightest whim. Hardly. Though I've been surely tempted a few times. The line between argument, trolling and abuse is very fine sometimes. One persons emphatic argument is another's troll, and vice versa. Even trying to argue with those crying foul is resource intensive and worse than outright abuse! Rare indeed is the article that would approach 2% comment moderation. And generally those are just due to poor word choice. I wouldn't agree with all the words that Pamela enforces on, but then my standards are far lower. You may call me Mr Potty Mouth.
Amusingly, my proudest hack for Groklaw was to lock old articles from further comments. Gawd that was funny when that went live. Conspiracy theories abounded amongst those prone to such. Sadly for the paranoid, that particular hack was the result of having spent several hours on a Sunday afternoon helping Pamela remove porn spam. I was highly motivated not to go through that again.
The most visible hack I did was the NewsPicks. A resounding success even if I say so myself. . While I did the coding, it wasn't all my work! Finally getting the time to clean up the code for the two RSS feeds last year was another good moment. Plenty of little bits scattered throughout. Groklaw is not how I would run things. Not that I've ever told Pamela that - gawd only knows she gets enough idiots who feel her sole reason for existing is to listen to their opinion on how Groklaw should be run.
That amazing lady has *far* more patience than I ever would.
I've made some great friends out of Groklaw - actually met Peter a few years back. My gain, his loss no doubt!
Met some truly incredible people. And was and am stunned at how incredibly many people from so very many different fields and walks of life have all come together. Yes I do mean *lots* of people. I've seen the server logs. It's *scary* how much traffic Groklaw handles, and on such minimal *volunteered* resourcing too.
It's been a buzz. It's been a thrill. It's been proud. It's been frustrating. It's been frightening (literally). And it's till ongoing. And I did feel guilty for pulling out. Ethics. I blame my parents for installing a strong moral compass in me.
As Marbux emailed me in response to my notice of resignation:
"I also appreciate that when reading the manuscript of a lifetime, it's necessary to turn the page every now and then."
And that pretty much sums it up nicely.
Still a member of Groklaw, just not as active.
- Steve
