Hello All,
I'm not reading the list officially -- in Marseilles, grabbing emails on my PDA
during those damm surface-intervals. Btw., the water is beautiful, the
visibility generally good and the fish are getting VERY close to the mask :)
Enough OT chatter....sorry.
I have a couple of comments to the ongoing dicussion of what I would call the
lists "charter". I thought I would vent those. It's midnight and I have 2h53min
before being NO2-desautrated anyyways, so why not? ;)
First of all, Tom S. mentioned that I declared "digital OK" on the list a while
back. That is partially true, partially not true ;) I do not declare anything
OK or not-OK on the list -- I try to figure out the conensus (rough concensus,
at best) of the list and enfore that to the best of my abilities. At the time,
it ws my understanding that a "large amount of listees" were interrested in
what I would call "digital aspect of OMography" and so that would be OK on the
list. In particular since "digital OMography" really consumes a small fration
of the list traffic.
Secondly, I can not and will not "moderate" posts. Hence, I am not the list
moderator. We all are - moderators responsible for moderating our own postings
;) What I do do occationally is, when people get personally "nasty" towards one
another, or when the OT chatter gets too far, to try and calm down thing
through "diplomacy". That's not something that I have "special powers" to do --
it's just more pratical that one person mails a "kind reminder" than if 253
angry listees mail a "kind reminder" when a topic is considred too far
off-topic. However I think tht this is list is cocmpsed by smart and
intelligent adults and that fundamentally it should be self-governing.
Moderated lists are not the solution in particulary not to this type of list.
One of the lists strengths is the ineractivity and responsiveness, and having a
"bottleneck" in form of a moderator or moderator team who must approve of a
post before it goes to the list would, imo., spell death of the olympus-list. I
don't think, btw., that the majority of the listees would consider having
someone arbitrate if their postings should go on the list or not to be a good
thing. Personally I do not like the idea of having a modderator performing such
a task.
Thirdly, the list has gone waay too OT lately. That's the fault of the
moderators -- as per the definition of each listee being the "moderator" of his
or her own postings. Shame on us all ;)
Fourthly, the reason we spell N*kon with the star is not that we dislike that
name. The reason is simply to help by other netizens: the archives are
googleable, which is nice -- but someone searching for info about his N*kon
camera probably is not too interrested in whatever we may post containing the
word N*kon. Hence, this is a purely "good netizen" thing, trying to contribute
a little less to the information pollution out there ;)
Fifthly, I believe that some sort of middle-ground must be found. I do not
believe that labelling posts [OT] [digital] etc will work. Achieving any kind
of consistent use of this will require constant policing of the list and
reminding "offenders". I know this from experience from other lists which I run
-- that being lists of a professional nature where one would assume that the
participants were professonally motivated to do things "right". It is a noble
goal, and by all means use the [OT], [Digital] etc. labels -- but we cannot
achieve any sort of consistancy in this. Also, while labels are useful for
sorting and filtering, [scanner], [Scanner] [Scanners] -- and the typos
[Scaner] etc -- makes user-typed-and-inserted less-than-useful in pratice. So I
precidct that such would see very liimited usage, and that their ue would be
discontinued rather quickly.
Sixth, Lee suggested, what I will imply as having an "olympus-OT" list and an
"olympus" lit, and encourage OT chatter to be posted on the OT list. It is my
opinion that this seperation is not useful: often OT spins off from an on-topic
thread -- and some times an OT thread becomes on-topic. I suspect that this
would be as inefficient as the labels discussed above. I also suspect that 990f
the current subscribers would join both lists -- or that 990f the postings
would be cross-posted to both lists ;)
One option would be to have two lists: the current list "olympus" and a
modrated list "olympus-moderated". The -moderated list would be postings
strictly filtered by some individual(s) to contain only strictly on-topic
posts. While techniclly possible, I question its efficiency in pratice.
Seventh, the Olympus lists are moving home "soon". I had promised to move them
about a year ago, however changes (personally and professionally) as well as a
hosting-provider I was negotiating with going belly-up has postponed that
proccess. I will be happy to play with multiple-list setups etc. once the
hosting is settled, however until then I ask for patience. It will be sorted
out "soon" (well, everything in France is closed in August, so take that into
consideration when I say "soon", ok?)
Eighth, I will upon my return to Paris configure the list software to reject
html. It seems that every so often a mail slips through with HTML, disturbing
everyone on the digest. The unfortunate sender usually, when being notified,
corrects the problem easilly. Thus, I will configure the list to bounce
html-posts to me such that I can notify the sender -- and such that it is only
me, not all digestees, which are disturbed by the html-mail. I think that this,
in the way the list currently is set up, is the best way. Once hosting issues
are sorted, we will probably run demime, which will allow to simply strip
mime-attachments (including html) automagically :)
Ok, those were my 0,02?.
I am very much interrested in getting input on this topic such that we can
ensure that the list will be a good place to be, with nice people (got that), a
technically high level (got that) and a reasonable s/n ratio (and this is where
we fall short at times).
I do not know if this thread contributes to lowering the s/n ratio, but I think
it is necessary to discuss these things. Alternatively, I can easilly be
reached by email of-list as well.
Regards
--thomas
(now on 2h15 before desaturated)
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