<nettime.free> many questions!

[eon@autono.net (eon)]

>From sandra.fauconnier@rug.ac.be Sun Oct 11 18:24:20 1998
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From: fokky <sandra.fauconnier@rug.ac.be>
Subject: many questions!


>Once again, there is an OPEN LIST for Nettime, free of
>any unwanted censorship, hidden agendas, personal tastes,
>anal-retentive book editors/librarians, respiratory diseases,
>and other information-hostile elements that have corrupted
>the intial mission of the nettime list as established by the
>founders of Nettime in Venice, June, 1995.


A deep sigh of relief... and many thanks to those who took this initiative.


A few questions and remarks though:

1. Most subscribers were not present at the initial nettime meeting in
Venice; so how important can that initial mission still be, how much of it
should be reformulated, or rather: do we need anything like an initial
mission at all?

2. On nettime-l discussion about the how and what of the list itself -
practical issues - were mostly kept in the dark, or held in small circles;
how about nettime.free? If you ask my opinion, I think it's extremely
important to discuss these issues thoroughly and openly, on the list
itself, so that the greatest possible number of people are kept informed
and are able to participate - drawback: more traffic. Openness vs. less
overloaded mailboxes. What do you want?

3. Announcements... I compiled the announcer for nettime-l, being quite
aware that this was a tricky and unpure thing to do (contributing to the
mechanism of moderation which, in fact, I'm very much opposed to), and my
motives for that were: keeping at least some of the nettime
responsibilities outside the usual circles ('who the f* is that fokky?' -
someone even thought I was not a person, but a script, which in fact I
consider a huge compliment), and practicing my own little tiny and
hopelessly naive part of the now rather hypocrit idea of 'gift economy' -
sigh. So much for public confession; right now all nettime-l announcements
are being sent to me, and I want to ask you: do I bounce them to
nettime-free? Or does anyone (xs2.net???) volunteer to host a separate
announcer-free list? Things being as they are now, I quit compiling the
weekly announcer digest (_and_ consider unsubscribing from nettime-l, but
that's another thing). But I'd like to know as soon as possible where I can
send the "raw" announcements to. Hopefully this problem will auto-regulate
soon, when people become aware that they can send the announcements
immediately to the list (which one??) instead of to me.

4. Policies of this list. I would like to make some strong (probably
impossible) statements about how I feel nettime-free should be maintained -
my personal opinion, perhaps (hopefully) controversial, expressed in order
to start a discussion about this.

- nettime-free shall not bring out any kind of printed or even xeroxed
publications. NETtime, remember?? Do we take this medium seriously or what?
(there's a damn lot of work to be done here, btw...) If people want to find
a channel to get their writing published on paper / for money somewhere,
let them please look for it elsewhere (or create their own forum for this
specific goal) and not impose their agendas upon those who want to get
something done *online*. Nettime-free shall try to find different channels
to distribute important content that is being exchanged here.

- nettime-free shall not organize physical meetings (ljubljana-style) and
shall radically avoid offline decision-making. Why? Because this kind of
stuff automatically creates 'inner circles' of people who are more involved
than others, and automatically deprives a considerable amount of
subscribers from important information. In my perception (which can be
wrong, I was not present at the meeting, grin) the big nettime gathering in
Ljubljana last year was a crucial point in the degeneration of the list.
Again: let's try to get things done with the instruments that are to
*every* subscriber's disposal - in this case: email. Again: do we take this
medium seriously or what?

- nettime-free shall strive to be as independent from any existing
institution as possible.

- nettime-free has no spokespersons, no representatives. No-one can attach
her/his name to this initiative.

- nettime-free shall strive for self-regulation. I.e. every author is
responsible for her/his own writing, mistakes, sloppy formatting; and if
subscribers are displeased with specific pieces of writing (which they, for
example, find offensive or consider spam), they are kindly asked to get in
touch with the author through personal (offlist) communication. May I
remind everyone (and I'm truly sorry to be so patronizing ;) again of the
existence of email filters, procmail and the nice and shiny delete button?
Traffic and overload are a problem, unless everyone takes her/his own
responsibility. (If you want to know about my own situation: I have very
little time to read things thoroughly, only have 1,4Mb email disk space to
my disposal, size checked every day - so i'm quite familiar with stripped
mailboxes - and the extremely expensive Belgian phone fees devour a very
considerable amount of my not-very-high income. Still I wouldn't dream of
missing this horrible daily portion of email overload :)

5. Some final questions and remarks:
- can anyone subscribe to this list, without approval from anyone else?
- will nettime-free have a website / archive? (we can have it archived at
egroups.com - five minutes' work, I can take care of it)
- I would like to ask to have the following line removed from the footer:
#  nettime.free is not infected with TB or other respiratory diseases
Why? because this initiative is too important, and shouldn't be trivialised
by personal vengeance motives, imho - even without TB, nettime-l would have
created its own other TB-like moderator personality, that's the crucial
point I guess, and the man has suffered enough from this, I think, even if
you're not particularly fond of him.

Expecting a lot from this,
many greetings,
fokky.



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