Scav Hunt ended on Sunday with judgment. Our team tied for 1st place with our rival team, despite a 39 point difference (somewhat controversial issue, but I understand the rationale behind the decision).
Now it's back to normal life, although many of us are still recovering from "scav withdrawal". For me, scav is like life concentrate. Take everything that's boring, mundane, or not memorable out of life, throw in everything that's good, exciting and awesome, pack it into 4 days, and you get scav hunt. What I really love about scav, and about my team in particular, though, isn't so much The Hunt itself but the human aspect. We had an alumn fly back from England, a girl worked on items while away in Italy, a sibling drove up from Mississippi, a guy drank a shot of sweat, another kept hammering a penny while spewing blood from a wounded finger, not to mention all the basics like sleep, food, sanitation, and sanity that get thrown out, all for the love of the team and the hunt. There's something fundamentally pure and beautiful about it...
Anyway, for those of you who weren't here for the fun:
Also, check out The Assbook, a fully functional Facebook parody that a friend of mine wrote in 4 days (by himself) for our team.
And finally, my favorite picture (you can just barely see me in between the vertical columns of the trebuchet):
I think Lawrence Lessig talked about something similar in Code, but we're having an interesting discussion in the MacLab.
The problem is this. Our machines rev nightly, and as part of the revving process, we've been wiping all user data. Our explicit policy is that we make absolutely no guarantees about user data, particularly over night. However, the reality of it is, most users are not entirely aware of our policy, and have a tendency to ignore posters, warnings, etc we put up. One of our tutors modified the revving process to not delete files that have been modified within 3 (or any fixnum) days.
I think this is a horrible idea, but others seem to disagree.
The reason I think this is a horrible idea is simple: we are creating conflicting policies. One policy is our explicit one, where we say we don't save user data over night. The other policy is the implicit one, where we in practice will be saving user data for some number of days. Where this becomes an issue is that users are more likely to follow our implicit policy than our explicit policy, because even though they do not read signs, they definitely notice when they see (or don't see) their files from previous days.
So we will then, through our own practice, be implicitly telling our users that user data is stored for some indeterminate number of days, while not being able to provide the level of service/security users will naturally expect/assume (that is, user files can suddenly disappear, and we will simply point at our unnoticed signs).
What really baffles me is that, none of our users are asking us to store data. If they ask and we tell them we wipe the hard drives every night, they understand. Yet by introducing an implicit, unofficial, and un-demanded service, we're jeapordizing users data. It makes no sense to me.
What am I missing?
