[SystemSafety] Mailing list: the archives

[Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2025-02-14 13:15 , Stefano Costa wrote:
> On 14/02/25 12:46, Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin wrote:
>> a decade or more. The arrangement has been, for over a decade, that the list is archived at 
>> https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/mailman/ private/systemsafety/
>>
>> Paul suggested that page is "private", but there is no access information required.
>>
>
> Actually yes it's private, login with your email/password is required (the browser remembers 
> anytime in the past you already logged in: check with a private window)

Oh. So it does.

Then there is another problem, rather more difficult.

The tech part. Someone needs to mirror 
https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/mailman/private/systemsafety/ and to maintain the mirror.  
That's the easy bit.

Now the legal part. Permission needs to be obtained. The list achives contain messages written by 
list members since August 2012. According to GDPR we would need to have the express agreement of all 
those list members who have posted anything since August 2012 that their restricted communications 
be made publicly available (along with their email addresses). Indeed, some of those messages were 
written when existing list members knew the archives were publicly available, but that will only 
have been guaranteed up until we started the archive at the URL given above, or at the latest 2017. 
So for a number of years the list has been legally private. GPDR is relatively new and any 
up-to-date public archive will be a new DB, so you have to get permissions all over again. There may 
well be messages from people who have now left the companies they worked for, in which case you have 
to find out where they are now, and get both their permission and additionally the permission of 
their company to publish. If someone wants to undertake to do that, and to collate the responses to 
have the legal records if publication should be challenged, then I am happy to support that effort 
(as long as it does not involve too much work for me).

That would also mean that, if we switched to SCSC or another site, it would have to be a *new* 
forum. SCSC could host the old archives but only protected, for those who already had access. They'd 
put their own access control on it, but there would need to be a transition period so that people on 
the Bielefeld list could receive the new access details. That could be managed, but I am not sure it 
could be managed easily. And I might have to obtain some legal advice concerned the transition, 
which would cost €300-500 (that's two to four hours of a lawyer's time).

> My concern is linked to the fact that I find the content of the list really valuable and with very 
> limited comparable sources for anyone interested in Functional Safety, so I'm willing to help in 
> maintaining the content alive and properly backed up. Is it at risk? Anything that might be useful?

Thanks for the offer. I can't think at the moment of anything helpful and plausible. I am open to 
suggestions.

PBL

Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin
Causalis Limited/Causalis IngenieurGmbH, Bielefeld, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)521 3 29 31 00