[gopher] Gopher Community Infrastructure...
Mailing List, Newsgroup, etc...
Hm... Okay here's my buck twenty seven:
I'd like to get this out of the way first. Cameron, Christoph, Kim, Ray,
and myself - these are people I know to be capable and qualified to
administer and maintain resources with respect to our community. I'll
get back to that later, and no, I'm not going to "Vote", and I'm not
going to throw my hat into hosting or administering "Yet another" mail
list as a community volunteer, in case of any questions that arise from
my suggestions and recommendations below.
Moving along...
People are talking about a 'vote', and there's been no real 'discussion'
about infrastructure, other than four people previously saying that to
some degree they could, would like, or are willing to if no one else...
You get the idea.
I don't really like the democratic approach - it didn't work for the
Athenians, they had to elect Tyrants every so often in order to fix
things, and having seen what it can do to a musical project (bands), I
find it to be a very divisive formula. i.e., just try to make that song
work when three people 'voted' to perform it live while the guy/girl
who hated it was the one voting against it.
Exercises in a knee jerk Democratic process often leaves some
significant majority feeling slighted, because perhaps they felt
strongly opposed to an idea that was pushed through hastily without even
the comment/input period to let everyone breath and contemplate, or
maybe they just were adamantly opposed and now they feel like they're
the odd man out, a bit disenfranchised even.
Representative democracy works for me in some situations - especially
larger communities where the whole mess of a democratic system would
find that ship in irons, drifting aimlessly in the current. And
democracy does that, while representative democracy allows the face
saving feature of all constituents involved to place their confidence in
representatives to govern on their behalf, all the while conveniently
offering a scape goat for their lamentations if one of their
representatives supports a particular issue unpopular with them.
Consensus - I love consensus building, because it takes time, and allows
everyone that time to reflect on just how a decision might have far
reaching impact for the group. To me, in a small group or "Band", if you
will, consensus means that when five people decide upon something,
everyone agrees to go along with it, for the betterment of the
community, even if they don't really like it. i.e., four bandmates love
and want to do the song - if bandmate five hates it, the matter is taken
off the table for the time being, if bandmate five isn't feeling the
love, but wants to defer to everyone else for the sake of koombaya, then
no one feels as if their feelings were marginalized.
What I would like to see here is consenus. I see a few ideas that on the
surface, appear to be incongruent, Usenet verses an email list, etc. But
they're not.
So before jumping onto a bandwagon of finding a better mousetrap, I
think it's best, as is the case in almost all matters of systems
analysis, to identify the current 'system', before looking at the
feasibility and costs incurred for a new 'system'.
What currently exists? Well for one thing, a few folks here have
mentioned creating a new newsgroup, or using the existing newsgroup.
Certainly, I don't believe that yet another newsgroup (there's actually
more) would be of any benefit, and as diluted and marginalized as it has
become, why we would want to place yet another hurdle in place for a
n00b, or a passive bystander, or tech fan, to observe or participate.
If people wish to use and communicate on one of the existing newsgroups...
gmane.network.gopher.general, comp.infosystems.gopher, and I'm sure there's one under 'alt.' as well, then those are already in place. In fact, some folks use gmane to post to this list, a list which has archives going back 17 years to 2000.
Now What about Gmane (and perhaps other discussion archive systems that
may be picking up from this list)? I believe that continuity is of
paramount significance, and many people here have spent a lot of time
keeping track of the lineage and history and digging up and maintaining
archives pertaining to Gopher. There's no reason why a breakage with
gmane will need to occur.
Mail lists - this mailing list isn't actually all that easy to find.
It's not hard if you look, but it's a big hassle to join and participate
on. John, announced his retirement a few years back, even handed off
OfflineIMAP and other projects, no longer maintains any Debian packages
that I know of, and if I'm not mistaken this list seems to have the
moderation bit turned on for all new subscribers - that's very bad in my
not so humble opinion....
Sure, if you're going to take a Laissez-faire attitude, and be an admin
in absentia, like John has become, then it certainly reduces the amount
of admin time required, all the bounces from spambots posting to the
list requiring rejection, etc., but there are active folks here, and the
Alioth admins are there for us to contact if we're having a problem - I
don't know if they're going to want someone with Debian dev privs to
become a listadmin, or if any schmoe would be fine as long as we agree
to support that person as admin.
The list is slow - not the slowest, I'm on a LUG that appears to take
over 8hrs to resend posts sometimes, and that is excruciating. I
currently still run and host about 50 (nice and snappy) lists myself, so
I'm not interested in doing it myself, although I'm going to offer to
contribute otherwise - more on that later too.
This list is in debian.org - and that is worthy of some mention. There
are implications, or at least, assumptions, that come with respect to
the association of the list with the Debian.org domain. It's not an
endorsement, nor an indication of any project associations, but it's a
bit worthy of mention. Something like our community's gopher discussion
list hosted on suckless or ratthing or even floodgap is technically only
a matter of the characters in the string, but Debian is already
associated some level of quality branding with connotations of
institutional heritage - the other domains, not so much. No offense.
Right now, the list exists in the form of a syndication to gmane, more
notably, is hosted under the debian.com domain, and there's
comp.infosystems.gopher too (but that is separate and not connected at
this time) - the newsgroup is not going anywhere and it's there in case
anyone uses it.
The problem with the moderation bit (if that's what it is)? someone
needs to check it everyday for new signups and attempted posts. I don't
know that I've been asked to set that more than once or twice, an open
list doesn't need that but perhaps in John's thinking he wasn't going to
be around... IIRC, you had to join, and then attempt one post, then John
would take your moderation bit off... if the lights are on and nobody's
home that's not a good thing.
So first, I do think that someone here should be chosen to contact the
alioth admins, and ask about their official process for changing/adding
new list admins. It's really just one checkbox.
If there have been questions about how responsive the list server is,
this is actually something that I might consider in whether I would
support a move to another host.
Mailman: I like Mailman. It's a good list server. If it wasn't, it
wouldn't be just the good looking GUI that makes it so popular ;)
Now, to move, means to encumber the list to a different provider. Were
it one of us or some other third party under our collective contribution
to the effort. There are people here (Just about everyone who is listed
in Wikipedia is here) whose contributions to the gopher community are
profound, and I would feel much better about entertaining the relocation
of the list to another host if the hostname was a self-bootstrapped
identify registered by, and hosted by the community itself - through a
particular member/participant or a contracted third party.
I would volunteer a domain registration in perpetuity, in the name of
some 'Gopher' named entity (The Gopher collective, International Gopher
Rescue, Mighty Gopher birds). We would have to come up with a brand
registration - something with a short string, that is relevant, and
unambiguous sounding when spoken. Something with the word GOPHER in it -
and the list would live there.
Now regardless of where the DNS would point... The MX RR could in fact
still point to the very same list server but that's not relevant to the
discussion here even if we decided to go for a different hostname for
the mail server.
Then we would need a server. Cameron said it was not beyond the realm of
possibility for him, but that he wasn't looking forward to something
like that, and no reason he should. Christoph tossed his hat right into
the ring, and we obviously need and should have more than one admin,
while Kim leaves bases loaded with Ray up to bat - yes that is quite a
capable custodial crew.
Whether or not a decision to move off of Alioth occurs, there is no
reason why, with the appropriate amount of admin intervention, we
shouldn't be able to preserve the archives in a linear way, and maintain
the existing gateways - even adding comp.infosystems.gopher into the
current mix (which should satisfy those who enjoy working with their
newsfeeds).
"An do no harm." I had a kooky girlfriend who used to say that. It's
kind of a credo of sysadmins - never leave a system with something you
broke lol.
Something MUST be done about the problems with subscriptions to the
list, but I know that it can be addressed with the server
administrators, and if even if we don't move the list at this time, I'm
pretty adamant about us needing more than one administrative point of
control so this doesn't happen again.
If I 'were' to propose anything, and I'm not, I would propose we get a
domain, come up with a name for the group as an entity to promote the
production value and relevance of gopher protocol, and between a few of
us, pick up a dirt cheap little VPS for some things, with an MX RR
pointing to ratthing or suckless SMTP servers... for example.
GC is workable, so is EC2, so are low end providers which are often a
much better way to go.
Regardless, Administration of the list needs to be addressed at the very
worst case scenario, since the subscribers to the list could be migrated
to a new listserv. Admins aren't moderators, and this list is
self-moderating anyway due to the tight-nit nature of the community, so
the only real functions would be to stave off bots and reject/block
stuff like that.
Well I think that was about twenty nine cents right there. Two cents
over budget, so I'll leave off there and encourage any suggestions and
ideas, which I enthusiastically look forward to.
--
Bradley D. Thornton
Manager Network Services
http://NorthTech.US
TEL: +1.310.421.8268
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