The following article announces the NativeNet Web site, such as it is,
for your review. (For those of you still not familiar with the Web
and how to use it, I want to provide some pointers to information that
should be useful as soon as I get a chance, which I hope will be within
the next several weeks.) Before providing the URL for the site, I'd
like to say a few things...
I wanted to take a few minutes before leaving for the INSAP conference
in Saskatoon, where I'll be making presentations about NativeNet and what
we've accomplished over the past six years, and the AISES conference in
Detroit, where I'll be working beside Borries Demeler, who operates the
AISESnet mailing lists and archives, helping students get a "hands-on"
experience of what the kind of networking we've been doing can offer them.
During these back-to-back conferences, I hope to be able to generate some
enthusiasm for taking NativeNet to another level of activity, wherein we
use more than mailing lists to do what we do and where what we think about
doing is a lot more ambitious - focussed on activity as well as just all
the talking and exchanging information we've been doing. Before I leave,
I wanted to tell you a bit of what I've been up to lately and where I'd
like to suggest we think about going. (BTW, the acronym "INSAP" stands
for "INformation Services for Aboriginal Peoples," and "AISES" is the
American Indian Science and Engineering Society.)
First, I'm trying to free myself as much as possible from the day-to-day
handling of the mailing lists, except in a technical support capacity.
As many of you know, Jay Brummett (jay@utw.com) is now handling NATCHAT,
the NativeNet mailing list carrying discussion (as opposed to the more
factual content of this NATIVE-L list). Jay's help in managing that list
is a great aid to me. Handling either NATIVE-L or NATCHAT is quite a big
task, and takes a fair bit of time to do well. I also appreciate very much
the assistance of Mary Kuhner (nnadmin@genetics.washington.edu), who deals
with taking care of undeliverable messages ("bounces" in netspeak). Mary,
who moderated NATCHAT for nearly a year, as I recall, some years ago, does
a wonderful job of taking care of subscriptions that have gone stale and
compensating for the network problems that sometimes plague us (BTW, please
keep Mary's administrative address handy, in case you ever have problems
with your account and then discover you're no longer receiving anything
from the NativeNet lists - which probably meant that Mary had to disable
your subscription so we wouldn't be flooded with bounce messages). I hope
to be able to announce various additional opportunities for people who
would like to volunteer (and to get in touch with those of you who have
previously offered help of one sort or another).
One main reason for taking a step back is so that I can have more time and
energy for other things, one of them being to facilitate the evolution of
NativeNet into an entity that can take good advantage of new technologies,
particularly that of the World Wide Web (WWW), which is now undergoing
explosive growth. I have been deliberating long and hard about how to best
take advantage of what the Web represents, and have been doing some experi-
ments in Web-weaving over the course of the past several months. I want to
think through what I want the NativeNet Web site to look like and what sorts
of functions I want to focus on performing through it. I'll be consulting
with professionals in various disciplines, including education and informa-
tion science before coming to decisions on a number of questions that I've
been asking myself during the past several months.
The answer to one question is very clear, though. That is that the Web is
a much better vehicle than mailing lists in some ways for conducting the
kinds of exchanges of information and perspectives that we've been doing
these past six years using a combination of LISTSERV-based technology and
the UNIX-based software I've written to manage things. There is still a
place for my software in processing articles, but I see the mailing list
mode of delivery as having inherent problems that make it unsuitable for a
day-to-day delivery of information and ideas once the volume reaches a
certain level. I'll probably have more to say about this subject after I
have returned from the conferences and have digested the experience. (It
may take me a few months to have time to have worked things through well
enough to present my ideas coherently, though.)
For now, let me just more-or-less formally present the still-very-rudimen-
tary NativeNet Web site, which I hope will give you an idea of the kinds
of things I want to establish as my first priorities. I want to keep the
thing as spartan as possible for the immediate future, and to use it mainly
as an adjunct to the kinds of conversations we have by means of the mailing
lists. Though I have created a list of links to various other sites as one
part of the current offering, I'm not sure about maintaining that list.
Eventually, I'd like to have the list of links be to those sites with whom
we have an active affiliation, rather than trying to cover all the good
resources out there on the net, both because there are others out there who
are already doing that sort of thing, and because I feel that there is as
much (if not more) value in producing a list which represents a deliberately-
limited catalogue whose content is felt to have particular value for a given
purpose as there is in linking in everything and anything. I plan to create
a dialogue with list members who have a background in subjects relating to
the organization and presentation of information and to work with them in
order to enable our site to become an especially valuable resource, rather
than just the hodge-podge of pointers hither and yon that some sites tend
to be (which is wonderful and fun in its own way - but it can be a real
pain if you're looking for some piece of information and find yourself lost
in the electronic jungle that the Web is in the minds of many).
So, "without further ado," let me tell you that you can access the NativeNet
World Wide Web site using the URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/natnet/
This page is located at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet,
Minnesota, which was the site of the annual AIHEC (American Indian Higher
Education Consortium) conference this past April, where I made presentations
about NativeNet and WWW.
Web resources have also been donated by AISES, the American Indian Science
and Engineering Society (in particular, the large amount of disk space that
is needed to maintain the NativeNet mailing list archives, which I am now
in the process of constructing on the AISES machine at the University of
Texas). You might be especially interested in the NATIVE-L archives, which
can be accessed via:
http://bioc02.uthscsa.edu/.aises/gst/nl/
(This URL is linked in to the main page at FDLTCC, but you can get to it
directly using this address, which is probably more convenient than working
your way down from the home page at the other location.)
Please take a look at the "About this archive" to learn about the bugs and
limitations of the present implementation. In particular, these archives
are not presently reliable for articles from about 3 November onward, due
to a bug described on the "About this archive" page, which I hope to fix
soon after returning from the INSAP and AISES conferences in another week.
Once the problems described on that page are fixed, plus any others that
we discover, many of you may elect to drop your subscriptions to the lists,
finding Web access to be more convenient (you will still need to submit
articles via mail, though. I'll need to figure out a way that you can do so
directly via the Web page, which shouldn't be too difficult, since I have
seen sites where such things are being done).
Well, I have a plane to catch in just about another twenty-four hours, so
I must close now. I have a lot of ideas for projects we can work on with
one another, which is one of the ideas I plan to present at the conferences.
I hope to tell you about these ideas after I've returned and have a chance
to write out some of the things I've been thinking about (for years).
During my absence, the lists will be in the capable hands of Jay Brummett,
with administrative assistance provided by the indefatigable Mary Kuhner,
both of whom I thank again. Without their help, I'd never have enough
time or sanity to do what I do. The only uncertainty is that there have
been some problems with my aging UNIX computer which provides critical
support for the mailing lists (the TAMVM1 system at Texas A & M does the
actual broadcast of articles, but my "gnosys" machine does a whole lot
more, which I'll be talking about in an article I've begun writing, and
which I plan to post on the Web page, in hypertextual form, after I get
a chance to finish it, just to give you some appreciation of how the whole
thing works). So - if you suddenly stop receiving mail from the NativeNet
lists during the next week, you can assume that my machine has gotten hung
up somehow, and that I'll fix things when I return (on Monday the 13th).
I'll look forward to anything people have to say about the Web site, which
I ask that you send to "nn-web@gnosys.svle.ma.us" rather than to my regular
mailbox, just to make things easier for me. Oh - speaking of feedback, I
want to thank again everyone who sent messages about the "apology" article
I wrote recently. For now, let me say only that in general the responses
were very supportive, with a few from people who said they agreed with what
I was trying to say in the note I inserted into Lara's article (though I
think I would have done it all a bit differently if I had it to do over
again). Despite reservations about some of the hype concerning "virtual
communities" and the like (from people like Howard Rheingold, who has
written books on the subject), it does feel to me as if we do actually have
something of an electronic family, even though folks are constantly coming
and going. I want to thank you all just for being there, and for making
NativeNet what it is.
Warm regards to you all - see you in a week.
Gary
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,cdp}!gnosys!gst