Re: <nettime> process reporting?

[Ted Byfield via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org>]

Hi, all —

First: MANY thanks to Kein for many years of supporting the list (as well as such else besides), and apologies for the shorthand description of the conceptual and technical problems surrounding this list. Personally, I like to keep expressions like thanks and apologies as clear as possible — unencumbered with "ifs" or "ands," and not bundled together — but that didn't happen in this case. Nettime, and many other projects, have always depended on the non-obvious care and long-term commitment of people like Florian; those efforts should be acknowledged as such. Maybe putting it personally is best: it's a very rare privilege — really one of the great rewards of my life — to have worked with people like Felix and Florian over such a sustained period. That's better.

It's important to note that Felix and I decided to move the nettime-l not just for "technical" (or, as Florian rightly says, *conceptual*) reasons related to mail delivery. Over the years, nettime — which includes several lists, domains, etc — has had many homes, *all* of them thanks to the generosity of others, always on the basis of personal friendships. So handing this list over to others isn't just technical or conceptual, it's above all *social*. Felix and I believe that whoever takes over the list should bring their own infrastructure, for a number of reasons.

At a minimum, the list will be stronger when everyone involved in supporting it, visibly and invisibly, has made that commitment in an active and coordinated way. But, more maximally, I think it's clear that the list needs some kind of renewal — more expansive thinking about ways to include new contexts, make it more responsive, find new urgencies. There's a good chance that more expansive  ideas about nettime will need more than just reliable mailing-list support.

All this noise about DNS, Google, Mailman configs, etc matters; but it's also a sign that the days of open, unmoderated mailing lists are coming to an end. So: whither nettime?

As Felix noted, we don't really have a positive "process" for this, and we don't need one, imo. What we do have — I hope — is the collective trust, accrued over 25 years, that we'll handle this transition as well as we can, as we always have. But, really, the focus shouldn't be on us or our non/process, it should be on YOU ALL.

Here's the challenge: If you care about nettime(-l?) and want it to continue, you should think of it as an active project, not as a passive service. Talk amongst yourselves and come up with ideas that *you* can and will make happen. Not the quasi-monarchic "let's do X" or "we should do Y," which invariably mean someone else will be doing the doing. I mean something that you and a team of others will commit to supporting, nurturing, and imaging in the long term.

It seems inevitable that someone will ask well, what about Menno's proposal? I'd prefer that Felix and I don't critique proposals in public, but in this case it seems like an exception is OK. As I said several says ago, I *know* "that two of the people named for a moderation team never agreed to any such thing." I don't want to elevate that to the level of some ad-hoc principle, but it seems reasonable to say that *voluntelling* unwitting third parties isn't, let's say, a "best practice."

But let's shift the focus from what shouldn't be to what *could* be.

Cheers,
Ted

On 27 May 2023, at 5:50, Felix Stalder via Nettime-tmp wrote:

> hi everyone,
>
> On 26.05.23 16:53, John Hopkins via Nettime-tmp wrote:
>> Will we hear anything more about the processes that are perhaps going
>> on in the background? This may be a task for the new moderators, to
>> let subscribers know what's going on ...
>
> there isn't really a process at this point. So let's try to establish one.
>
> * We had to move nettime away from kein.org, after being generously supported by kein.org and Florian Schneider in particular for an extremely long time, because Google blocked kein in nasty ways and we couldn't fix it easily. Email is a pain these days and Google regards spoofing headers (which is, technically, what mailman does) as spam by default. If you happen to one of the blocked accounts, you can read here what you were missing:
>
> https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2305/threads.html
>
>
> * tl'dr version: We (Ted Byfield and myself) announced that after 15 years, we were longer willing to maintain the list and would either hand it over to people who can do the technical task of hosting and social task of janitoring (nettime hasn't been moderated for subscribers for many years, but still needs care), or close down the list.
>
> * There seems to be a consensus that the list still holds value (which I share) so closing it seems not the best option.
>
> * A few people came forward to say that, in very general terms, they (or others!) would be contribute, but that hasn't coalesced into anything concrete.
>
> * As far as I can tell, the most concrete offer came from The Waag for hosting the list and the web-archive. But maybe Henk can say something about this?
>
> * Thanks to the support of Luka Frelih, we are now hosted by Ljudmila which couldn't be better.
>
> * But as the name of the list indicates, this is only a temporary solution. While Luka hasn't imposed a deadline, I will: end of June.
>
> * So, we have about one month to find a new technical infrastructure for the list (2000 subscribers as of now) and the webarchive (mid 1990s MHonArc), and a new team of janitors. Both aspects, the technical and the social, are not very difficult or onerous, but they require continuous attention and long-term care. I'm happy to elaborate what that meant so far, if somebody cares.
>
> So, let's get this done and let's do it on the list.
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