Migrating out of Plans

Referring to my current practice of responding in this Web log to questions posed in Plans, Lindsey Kuper writes: “So, you post over there, and we comment over here? Were passenger pigeons not awkward enough?”

Similarly, Nathalie Lauze writes: “i'd like to know why you've done what you've done re: Plans and your new blog. i'd prefer if you posted on Plans so i didn't have to open a new window.”

I realize that the process is more cumbersome than interacting exclusively through Plans. The long-term advantages are (1) that we can use the same system for interacting with people who don't have Plans, and (2) that we can use the same system even if Plans is unavailable. Part of the reason that I'm obliging you to click through to the Web log is that I'm hoping that you will bookmark it or add it to your feed reader, and thus still be able to access it if Plans is down.

In many ways, Plans is currently in transition. Currently, so far as I can tell, no one feels really responsible for maintaining it. It's been a week (less ten hours) since Sechyi Laiu declared that “while the voting process is ongoing, I am passing control and ownership of the domain name and server over to [lauzenat], effective immediately. She has generously agreed to take over.” Yet there is no sign that Ms. Lauze has indeed taken over. She says nothing about it in her Plan, not even whether she intends to proceed with the second phase of the mock election that Mr. Laiu was conducting. The greeting page hasn't changed in a week; no one has even logged into the [plans] account since July 18; no new Plans have been created in a week.

I suspect that Ms. Lauze will find that being the Plans maintainer is a difficult and thankless task, and I'm worried that she will tire of it just as quickly as Mr. Laiu has. I don't know her nearly as well as I have known any of the previous Plans maintainers. Although I have exchanged a few e-mails with her and am aware that she has been on the Student Academic Computing Committee, the main evidence of her decision-making ability that I have seen is not all that promising: She was a member of the Grinnell Online Advisory Committee, the body that basically created the College's current Policies for Virtual Communities -- the same policies, Lindsey, that would require me to obtain your name, e-mail address, street address, telephone number, and consent to the terms and conditions of the Grinnell College External User Policies before I could allow you to submit comments to my Web log (which is the main reason why my Web log won't have a comment facility).

Meanwhile, despite having “washed his hands” of Plans, Mr. Laiu appears to be maintaining enough control to move it to a new server. It's not yet clear whether the new arrangement will, as he hopes, make the database service more reliable, and whether Plans will function just as well in the new environment. Despite Mr. Laiu's assurances, it's not at all clear that he has provided for the survival of Plans.

In addition to the internal uncertainties, Plans faces a serious external challenge from Blogger, LiveJournal, and other similar systems. Many of the students who enter Grinnell this year are already maintaining blogs and may not be satisfied with what they perceive as a much more limited environment provided by Plans. This group includes the most active bloggers and probably a lot of the most capable programmers, the ones who would make good maintainers for Plans in a year or two. In my opinion, it is imperative for Plans to learn how to interact with other blogging systems. There is no indication that this will happen.

These transitions have led me to reassess my enthusiasm for Plans. Back when Plans was running on MathLAN, I was extremely enthusiastic about it and recommended it widely, because I thought that it reflected very well on the students who created and maintained it and on the College that supported it as an experiment in on-line publication.

Then, two years and one week ago, the College forced it to move to an off-campus server. I was still enthusiastic about it, though, because even though it no longer reflected well on the College, its history put the students who created and maintained it and those who then saved it, in order to preserve their liberties, in an even better light. I was proud of the response of the Plans community.

Then, over the last year or so, the nominal maintainer (Mr. Nnadi) lost interest in Plans, and the Yellow Tail team took over the code and started developing proposals for elaborating it in various ways, many of which struck me as fanciful. So far as I know, none of them has yet been implemented in running code, and the one piece that I've seen worked out in detail (Josh Rosenbluh's grammar for the Plans Query Language) contained a lot of errors and confusions.

Then Mr. Nnadi's failure to renew the domain name enabled Mr. Laiu to hijack Plans, thus breaking the continuity of the sequence of student maintainers. Mr. Laiu has used his position of power primarily as a means of yanking people's chains for his own amusement -- which, I agree, he is in some sense entitled to do. But this policy, coming after what I regarded as kind of an off year anyway, has damped my enthusiasm for Plans.

During and shortly after the Great Plans Out(r)age of 2003, a lot of students created Plans T-shirts and marketed them through Cafepress.com. I bought one of each, a dozen or so altogether. A few days ago, the one that says “proud user of [plans]” on the front came to the top of the pile. Instead of putting it on, I sighed and moved it to a bottom drawer.

I'm no longer enthusiastic about Plans. I'm now enthusiastic about syndication and the possibilities implicit in the standardization of Web document metadata in Atom, and I'm interested in having more control than Plans can give me. This seemed like the right time to make the move.

On a related matter, Josh Vickery writes: “Would you be willing to run a program that monitored your atom feed and posted updates to your Plan?”

Yes, I would. If Plans ever acquires the file-upload facility that has been languishing on the developers' to-do list for more than a year now, I'll even write the script to construct and transmit the updates.