nettime's_mod_squad on Tue, 12 Aug 2003 19:43:06 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> a proposal: nettime-ann |
Dear Nettime -- Over the last several years, nettime has evolved from a handful of committed weirdos into an empire whose subscribers span the earth. Naturally, its astounding success has piqued the interest of lots of institutions, big and small, which recognized its potential to advance their ambitions. As a result, they send in announcements -- lots of them, often in duplicate, triplicate, or even quadruplicate. As it stands, there are two ways announcements arrive in nettime's inbox, more or less: (1) someone actually, personally sends something, or (2) someone who used to work at some organization years ago got in his or her noggin to add nettime to the org's PR list, and ever since then their PR machine has run like clockwork. Over time, (1) has dwindled to a trickle while (2) has reached epidemic proportions. As a result, the vast majority of announcements that pass through nettime's "announcer" function were never sent to nettime in any human sense: they just happened. It's hard to say what nettime is "about" (Bruce Sterling put it nicely when he called it "the world's most world list"), but it's fair to say that many of these announcements don't really get it. While it's good to have a "push" channel for diverse announcements, the current moderation team is growing more and more skeptical about the cost/benefit balance of providing this function in the way that we have thus far. There are lots of ways to think about it, ranging from the overall balance of traffic on the list to the amount of work the announcer requires (though most of it is done with Perl scripts). Even if the labor required were a non-issue, moderating non-choices made by systems rather than choices made by people is very problematic. So we're considering changing the way we provide this service. But rather than simply announce this as a fait accompli, we'd like to hear what you think. Here's our proposal according to our current thinking: (1) We'll continue to distribute only those announcements on nettime-l which show evidence of actually, personally having been sent by someone specifically to nettime. (2) We'll set up another list, nettime-ann, to which we'll bounce all announcements that do not directly, intimately relate to nettime -- as measured, mainly, by the fact that some nettimer took the time to send them specifically to nettime-l. Nettime-ann would be a digest-only list. The schedule of the digest could be either by size (say, 1000 lines) or date (say, once a day). We're using majordomo, which limits the options (but, still, we like it better than mailman); however, nettime-ann could be run by other means. Basically, in this model, if you want to see all announcements sent to nettime, you'd subscribe to nettime-ann; if you don't want them, then you wouldn't. Simple. There are a lot of contingent ("deeply intertwingled") details to be settled. For reason of rough relevance and spam (and there is a surprising amount of art-related -- as in van gogh -- spam) we believe that moderation will be necessary, at some level, if nettime-ann is to succeed -- which it should. If there is a separate moderation team (any volunteers?) the list could be run relatively independent of nettime-l. If it's the same old moderation crew that does both, we'll channel all mail through nettime@bbs.thing.net. We already have an excellent working model for such a cooperative arrangement in the "unstable" digests, which are compiled autonomously -- and recently had their first birthday. But this is nettime, so everything is always different; unlike "unstable," nettime-ann would be a separate list. But before we do anything, we want to hear what you think. Cheers, The Mod Squad # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net