On 2/11/01 10:11 AM, "James M Galvin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
(general response: what james said, in spades)
> And there are at least two legitimate "owners" of any discussion: there
> is the person who manages the conduit and the person who receives what's
> dumped in it.
I think there are three --
The creator of the content, who has an expectation of how it's to be
distributed and managed.
The receiver(s) of the content, who has an expectation of what they are
going to get.
The manager of the conduit, who's really editing the conduit (in the classic
publishing sense, although generally as much more of a macro level) who is
expecting the conduit to fulfill whatever purpose they have defined for it.
And I've thought about those definitions for a while, and I think almost all
fights we see come about when one or more of those expectations are missed.
If someone posts a message and finds it in the newspaper without approval,
the poster gets mad -- whether or not it's legal to use messages like that,
they aren't expecting to be talking to the newspaper. A receiver has some
idea of a list -- when a discussion goes off-topic or a list gets busy, that
expectation is shattered.
When people do things the admin doesn't want, he gets mad.
So at a very base level, does administration come down to understanding,
setting and educating expectations properly?
Hmm.
> So, what we really need is a technology or service that gives the
> conduit owner fine-grained control of the operation and content of a
> discussion, *and* gives the same control to a subscriber for controlling
> their inflow.
>
> Chuq, isn't this essentially what you're after in your experiment?
That's not essentially -- that's pretty close to exactly it.
Maybe I should have made this explicit before, but I don't see myself as a
list-manager, per se. For a forum-manager, or a news-manager, or any of that
stuff.
I'm a person looking to use technology to cause things to happen. To tie
back to my "if all you have is a hammer..." idea, if you think of yourself
as a list-manager, everything you design ends up looking like a mail list.
Which is not bad (and certainly not wrong!) but my view instead is to try
to figure out what I want to accomplish and then create a system to
accomplish it. Sometime's that's creating a mail list; sometime's it's
something else.
I love hacking the technology -- but my real interest is in doing something
with it. And there's always the next hack. We're never really done, it can
always be done better next time....
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
[<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.
Q: Did God really create the world in seven days?
A: He did it in six days and nights while living on cola and candy
bars. On the seventh day he went home and found out his girlfriend
had left him.
