Tristine Lee Smart
Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan
tristine@t.imap.itd.umich.edu
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Comments from NativeNet listowner, Gary Trujillo (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us):
[ This note applies only to subscribers of the NATIVE-L mailing list. Those
reading this article via Usenet or one of the APC member systems should
ignore it, since it does not apply to your mode of receiving this article. ]
Tristine's statement is more concise than the one I referred to in a note
attached to an article relayed earlier today, to which I will respond later,
but it makes the most important of the points made in that article, so I'll
try to respond to this comment for now.
I think my previous article mis-stated my real intent, which I see as being
trying to reduce my own workload, which has become considerable, and trying
to create a list which is reserved primarily for important news bulletins.
My use of the term "trivial" was, in retrospect, unfortunate. I intended to
talk about facts that would be considered "trivial" in the "trivial pursuit"
sense - e.g. "Who wrote that song?" or "What is the name of that song?" I
do not in any sense mean to de-legitimize this kind of inquiry. The fact is
that I need to find a way to get more time to handle other activities besides
moderating the four NativeNet lists I'm presently handling, which, in addition
to NATIVE-L, include NAT-LANG, NAT-EDU, and NAT-HLTH (at present, all of these
latter three have a fairly light volume, but sometimes a conversation thread
develops on one of them, and things can take off fairly quickly.
I don't have the time now to explain myself fully, but I do want to apologize
if I have conveyed the impression that I am applying personal standards to
what does and what does not qualify as legitimate subject matter for the
mailing list - rather, I am attempting to reduce the volume to a manageable
level in order to be able to spend some time thinking and planning for the
future, and also to enable people whose main interest is in more "newsy"
material to be able to subscribe to a list that is reserved mainly for the
purpose of passing on such information. But that is a matter that really
should be decided, as I see it, by means of spending some time reflecting
about how things are presently organized and how they could possibly be
better organized to serve the needs and interests of subscribers and to
satisfy some goals that I hope to be able to articulate over the course of
the coming weeks, assuming I can find the time to do so properly.
I would like to draw attention to the fact that I have been putting in a
great deal of effort over the course of the past six years keeping this
system running, which is no easy task, given the complexity of what has
developed as the result of a lot of effort. Managing a mailing list is
not an easy job as it is, but in my case, there are four active lists
(NATIVE-L, NATCHAT, NAT-EDU, and NAT-LANG) plus one occasionally active
one (NAT-HLTH). I have put a lot of work into writing, debugging and
maintaining software that tracks each article as it goes through the
process of approval, possibly by a remote moderator (as is now in effect
in the case of NATCHAT), and gating articles to Usenet and the APC confer-
encing system, as well as distributing them via the LISTSERV-based mailing
lists. There's also the matter of maintaining the subscriber lists, which,
though handled by a volunteer, still requires some effort on my part to
handle. And added to all these things, there is an enormous amount of
correspondence that occupies me constantly. On top of all these things
is the fact that I'm trying to extend NativeNet into Web space via the
NativeNet Web site (http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/natnet/), which I have done
singlehandedly, though I am now getting a bit of help from Jordan Dill,
who is working on preparing some index files into the NATIVE-L Web
archives for certain subjects, and I've had offers of help from other
quarters as well, for which I am grateful. But I cannot evade the task of
coordinating these activities.
I have asked for help repeatedly, and have gotten some from time to time,
but, for better or worse, I am still at the center of things. I have no
wish to control what goes on as tightly as some might imagine, but I do
want to maintain what I like to consider to be a certain quality in what
goes out. Please note that you've never seen articles like you do on
many mailing lists containing attempts to sell you magazines or alert you
of opportunities to discover romance from electronic catalogues that have
become more and more common as the result from more commercial services
coming onto the net. And you don't get things in your mailbox asking "How
do I get off this list - or how do I get onto this list?" And you don't
see articles with lines several hundred characters long because someone
unfamiliar with some new piece of mail software or unfamiliar with the
proper procedure for uploading word-processed files has sent an article
that could never be read if it went out the way it was received here.
Rather than going on in this vein, I simply want to state that I need to
find a way to reduce my workload for the present, which means trying to
reduce the traffic to what I consider to be the more important articles,
based on an admittedly arbitrary and idiosyncratic set of criteria simply
so that I can have more time to do what needs to be done to re-shape the
system into something that will, I feel, serve us all better in the future,
and so that we can have a dialogue about what we want. As I said in my
earlier article, I mean to imply no judgement about the merit or value of
various kinds of inquiry, such as those having to do with contemporary
culture, and I have suggested a couple of alternatives, one being the
Usenet newsgroups "alt.native" and "soc.culture.native," which should be
easily accessible to all of you, and via NativeNet's NATCHAT mailing list.
If anyone has comments about my decision, please address them to me, using
my own address (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us). Later, after I've laid out more
of the case I'd like to make for re-thinking what we're doing here, I want
to invite a public discussion, which will probably take place via a new
forum that I'll establish at that time. Meanwhile, I'd like to ask you
all to just "bear with me." I am willing to talk with people who have the
time and the judgement and the editing skills necessary to help with my
daily workload so as to give me more free time to do what needs doing in
order to move the process along more quickly. But I need people who are
willing to commit time on a daily basis - and preferably those who are
either familiar with UNIX editing tools ("vi" or "emacs") or who have a
local environment which permits them to send and receive text without
having it automatically re-formatted by their mail systems, which many
seem to do, and who have software that lets them easily intentionally
re-format articles when necessary to get around problems with long lines
that I just mentioned.
Again, my intent is not to impose arbitrary judgements on material - only
to retain my sanity while I am working with you all to take NativeNet to
a place where we all feel it is serving our needs and interests.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Gary
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,cdp}!gnosys!gst