Since I am attempting here to address two communities of people who might
not really know much about one another, I'd like to start with a few words
describing the two groups of people, before saying how they are being joined
and what the implications of this new relationship might be.
For the past three and a half years, people have been communicating about
subjects relating to indigenous peoples by means of electronic mailing
lists. These lists, now based mainly at the LISTSERV site "TAMVM1" at
Texas A & M University, are collectively managed under the auspices of an
undertaking known as "NativeNet." They comprise:
list name description subscription address
* NATIVE-L general information exchange listserv@tamvm1.bitnet
* NATCHAT general discussion listserv@tamvm1.bitnet
NAT-1492 Columbus quincentenary listserv@tamvm1.bitnet
NAT-EDU native education listserv@indycms.bitnet
NAT-LANG native language listserv@tamvm1.bitnet
(To subscribe to one of the lists, a message containing the text:
subscribe <list name> Your Name
where "<list name>" is replaced by one of the list names shown above,
and "Your Name" is your own full name, *not* your email address is
sent to the appropriate subscription address.)
A few other special-purpose mailing lists are based here on my own system,
"gnosys." I will post a separate article later describing these lists and
inviting interested persons to join.
The first two lists, NATIVE-L and NATCHAT, are now "gatewayed" with the
new "soc.culture.native" Usenet newsgroup (which I will describe in a bit)
in such a way that any article posted to soc.culture.native will be sent
to a NativeNet moderator who (if s/he approves it) will relay the article
to either the NATIVE-L or NATCHAT mailing list, both of which have fairly
large user populations - (~480 for NATIVE-L and ~340 for NATCHAT, as of
11 March 1993). Any article sent to mailing addresses attached to these
two lists will automatically be sent to soc.culture.native. (At some point,
we might want to consider creating separate Usenet newsgroups, in order to
separate the informational (NATIVE-L) and discussion-oriented (NATCHAT)
kinds of articles from one another for the benefit of members of both user
communities.
One additional fact that I would like Usenet readers of this article to
note is that it was largely members of the NATIVE-L and NATCHAT mailing
lists who are responsible for the passage of the Usenet measure which was
put forth by Michael Wilson. I explained that having soc.culture.native
will result in a larger and more diverse community, and that it will
provide easier access to some current mailing list members who might prefer
to use Usenet news, either on their own system or by means of the service
described in Mike's article (below).
Now let me say something about Usenet for the benefit of NativeNet mailing
list members. I want to go into a bit of detail in order to give some
basis for those mailing list members who might prefer to switch their
method of accessing NATIVE-L and NATCHAT. As Mike Wilson's article will
describe, anyone who is on a system connected to a computer system that
provides the "telnet" command should be able to get Usenet access, even
if her or his computer is not itself part of the Usenet network. Please
bear with me for a few paragraphs of slightly technical discussion.
Usenet is a subject that is difficult to describe. It consists of an
exchange of articles of a variety of topics, both technically-oriented and
on a wide variety of subjects of purely personal interest. In fact, one
would be hard-pressed to think of a subject not covered by a Usenet news-
group in some form or fashion. Users of the Usenet network are scattered
throughout the planet. The software used for Usenet permits the individual
computer systems employed by Usenet users to communicate with one another
in a completely automated fashion. The implementation of the system
involves each computer in the network being linked by means of dialup
modems and/or high-speed Internet connections to one another. When a
given computer receives a batch of news, it will sort it by category, and
pass on articles in selected (or all) categories to its "downstream net-
neighbor(s)," so articles are propagated throughout the network using
"store-and-foreward" technology, unlike what happens in the case of most
mailing lists, which use a "broadcast" mechanism to send individual copies
of articles to users' mailboxes. Usenet users do not receive news in their
electronic mailboxes, but by means of any one of several "news interfaces"
which they may have available to them. Most news interfaces (E.g., "rn/trn,"
"nn," "vn," "vnews," "tin," "gnus" (I think it's called) as well as the EMACS-
based news interface) are much more sophisticated than most electronic mail
systems in their capabilities. One can select articles on given subjects
within a given newsgroup, and can read selected "discussion-threads" in a
meaningful order. Trn ("threaded news-reader") even provides a little map in
the corner of the screen to show how the current article relates to other
articles in the same discussion thread, displaying a little sideways-tree
drawing, which is very helpful in figuring out whether a given article is a
response to an article in some sub-thread. Some computer systems provide
only one or two user interfaces, while some offer a wide variety. Any of
these interfaces can provide access to Usenet news, since they only represent
one "layer" of software that sit on top of a lower "layer" that does the
actual management of the news articles at a system level. The news inter-
face(s) provide(s) commands to save copies to individual articles, or of
entire discussion threads (at least "nn" does), as well as permitting the
user to respond easily to the author of an individual article or to post a
followup article (thus solving a problem for many mailing list users, who
presently have a hard time responding privately to the author).
The one other thing I should say about Usenet as part of this introduction
is that a newsgroup called "alt.native" has been around for a couple of
years, created by Paul Shields, then of the Native Computer Communications
Network at York University near Toronto, Ontario (Canada). That newsgroup
was not very active until early last fall, when I established a gateway
between it and the NATCHAT newsgroup. Many of the articles in alt.native
have come from the NATCHAT mailing list community, and some articles in
NATCHAT have come from alt.native. The main problem with alt.native has
been that, as a newsgroup in the Usenet "alt." hierarchy (major category),
it does not have wide distribution, since many systems administrators will
not carry "non-mainstream" hierarchies, such as "alt." due to the fact that
such newsgroups tend to have a low "signal-to-noise" ratio, and are so
numerous that they can easily become a burden on the resources of the system.
Now that soc.culture.native is a reality, I am hoping that current readers
of alt.native will migrate over to the new newsgroup, and that we can destroy
alt.native so it doesn't confuse people. (For the present, however, my soft-
ware will cross-post articles to both alt.native and soc.culture.native, for
the benefit of those systems in transition. However, articles posted to
alt.native will no longer be gated to NATCHAT. After a couple of weeks, the
alt.native newsgroup will no longer receive NATCHAT or NATIVE-L articles, so
anyone reading this article in alt.native is encouraged to switch to the new
soc.culture.native newsgroup, which should soon be on your system if it is
not already.)
Following is an article from Michael Wilson, explaining a method for people
who have no direct access to any of the Usenet news interfaces (readnews, rn,
trn, tin, nn, vn, vnews, notes, etc.)
| From: Michelangelo <crux2.cit.cornell.edu!idoy>
| Date: Sun, 14 Mar 93 11:21:11 -0500
| Subject: Free Linkup to Native Discussion Group
|
| Hello NativeNetters:
| Although your email site may not have UseNet newsgroups,
| you still may be able to access the soc.culture.native
| discussion group through the use of TELNET, a feature
| that many machines have.
|
| TELNET directly links up your email computer to another
| computer, which carries USENET newgroups. The best computer
| linkup I have found is nyx.cs.du.edu in Denver, Colorado, and
| it is FREE.
|
| To see if your email computer has this feature, type
|
| telnet nyx.cs.du.edu
|
| If your computer has TELNET, then you will probably see the
| word LOGIN:
|
| At the LOGIN:, type NEW, then follow the easy instructions.
|
| Because NYX has had problems with hacking, you will need to
| prove that you are who you are. One easy method is to mail
| them a check that has your name and address on it, although
| there are other, free methods. (It wouldn't hurt to send them
| a token contribution, because what you are receiving is essentially
| a free account with Mail, disk space, UseNet News, &c.)
|
| If you have any questions, feel free to send me email.
|
| Mike
|
| ========================== | Hofstadter's Law: It always takes
| Michael Wilson | longer than you think, even if you
| idoy@crux1.cit.cornell.edu | take into account Hofstadter's Law.
| ========================== | -- Douglas Hofstadter
For practical purposes, soc.culture.native and the NATIVE-L and NATCHAT
lists are now bidirectionally linked. Any article sent to the appropriate
posting addresses for those lists by members of those lists will be posted
to soc.culture.native as well as to the appropriate list, if approved by
the moderator of that list. Approved articles posted to soc.culture.native
will also be transmitted to the subscribers of either NATIVE-L or NATCHAT,
depending on their content (NATIVE-L is for informational items, and NATCHAT
is for discussion-oriented articles).
It may take a little while to work out whatever "bugs" remain in the system,
particularly concerning the matter of moderation. The readers of the mail-
ing lists cannot be as selective about what articles they receive as can the
people who have access to soc.culture.native, so the moderators may find it
necessary to be more selective than they would like to be to avoid overload-
ing list members, but we'll have to see how things work and what volumes are
actually present before making a determination on that matter. Before the
link with soc.culture.native was established this past weekend, we were able
to pass along nearly all articles that were submitted, and it is my hope that
we will be able to continue to do so. However, I and the other moderators
would be interested in receiving your comments, which you can send to me
personally (I'll convey them to Mary Kuhner and Jon Yamato, my co-moderators)
or you can submit as an article by responding to this message if you're on
one of the NativeNet mailing lists, or using the "followup" command of your
news system if you're reading this article via Usenet. (APC readers, who
will see this article in the "gen.nativenet" conference can use the command
",wrc" ("write-reply-conference") to respond.)
I look forward to a smoothly-functioning exchange of ideas and information,
and hope that we will become "one big happy family," all interested in the
important subject of indigenous peoples of all parts of the world.
Best regards,
Gary
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst