On Tue, 21 Jun 1994 06:03:48 -0500 Natalie Maynor said:
>It's ok with me if other listowners choose to
>run their lists in different ways.  All I was objecting to was the idea
>that there is some kind of universal agreement on what constitutes
>garbage.
 
Ditto. And my earlier post on the issue was not intended to suggest
(and I thought I qualified the statement enough, but maybe not) that
any particular method is *necessarily* best for handling the kind
of stuff Anthea was seeing on her list. The point was to introduce
an altnerative perspective to complement (?) the copious advice about
how to reassert control over a list that seemed out of control.
What's garbage and what's an appropriate level of control are matters
determined within particular contexts. Anthea clearly was asking for
advice about how to control. Me & Natalie are, I think, just suggesting
that overt control is not always required.
 
Just a bit of a sidebar to the main conversation, really.
 
But now that we're into it, I would like to add that relatively
hands-off list management styles do not inevitably invite anarchy
(as I think Anthea suggested they would). Chaos, maybe, but even
though I don't know my chaos/complexity theory very well, I do
know that what appears to be random and unmanaged activity may be
patterns in the process of emerging or patterns seen from the wrong
vantage point. My list is a self-organizing system, in a way. Its
conventions and etiquettes develop from the community's discourse,
not by declaration from me (though when necessary I participate in
the discussions). It's not anarchic in the sense that anything goes.
It is anarchic in the sense that there is no central authority applying
overt management of the discussion. The community manages itself.
And there are very definite patterns of behavior and threshold's of
tolerance for what the community defines as garbage.
 
And even though I don't keep it 'on-task' many tasks get done. Members
of the group have co-written fiction (one story is going to be published
in print soon), are on their second book project, have presented panels
together at conferences, and generally are quite productive.
 
As Natalie noted, it's not a better way, it's *another* way to
run a list, and it can work just fine.
 
--Eric Crump