Re: <nettime> Summary of today's meeting

[Geoffrey Goodell via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org>]

Dear John, new mods, and all --

Congratulations on reaching consensus on a plan to migrate to a new list and
manage the list going forward.  This is a great social achievement as well as a
great technical achievement.

The plans for social activities beyond the list itself are exciting.  I wonder
whether it is possible to demonstrate that such activities are in fact an
instrumental and critical to the success of a community in general, and whether
the success of an online forum depends upon the success of a community that
operates and enables it.  Nettime is certainly different from the online fora
operated by social media platforms, but what makes it different?  Is it because
the group that operates the infrastructure is not for profit?  Is it because
the participants in the forum have a say in how it operates?  Is it because its
leaders aspire to build something special and believe in what they are
believing?

Looking forward to insightful discussion for many years to come.

Best wishes --

Geoff

On Tue, 11 Jul 2023 at 05:29:48PM +0200, John Preston via Nettime-tmp wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Here is a longform summary of the synchronous meeting held today.
> 
> There is general agreement to move to servus.at as the new host for the??
> mailing list. They have about 2000 email accounts and a few hundred mailing
> lists so there are no concerns about management or scale.
> 
> We talked about problems with bots, and they are currently working on a??
> solution.
> 
> After the move, the intention for signup process seems to be to keep it the??
> same as it is now: users have to confirm their email via a link, and then be??
> manually approved by a moderator. We think this is currently scalable, effective
> for managing spam, and gives mod team a feel for "who's coming and going", which
> is nice to know.
> 
> We expect the move to take a couple of weeks, and there was some discussion??
> about when is a good time to do this, given it's summer now. Eventually the??
> archive and website will move as well, but probably that will happen after the??
> new list is established.
> 
> An initial pool of new moderators is now being formed and I think people will??
> meet again soon to organise this. I think Jordan, Christian, and Menno expressed
> interest in joining the new mod squad.
> 
> We also talked about pruning the subscriber list and figuring out how best to
> coordinate the move. This is an open question for the mod team to figure out??
> what to do, but there were suggestions of using the invitation function on the??
> new list to send out invites to everyone with activity in the last year, as a??
> way to make sure the most active members are able to migrate effectively, and??
> find a balance with just resubscribing lots of people who maybe don't want to??
> be on the list.
> 
> There was brief discussion about using the nettime.org domain name for the??
> mailing list, and this is still an open question. Ted would like to maintain??
> ownership for now and act as a guarantor, since it also points to other services
> like our website and the Mastodon instance [1]. Overall there did not seem to??
> be much concern either way in terms of the mailing list, as we expect host??
> moves to be few and far between.
> 
> We also talked about the role of moderation on the list, and making sure this is
> also about creating energy in the list, and bringing new people into the space.
> Ted pointed out that diversity is an issue for nettime, as the homogeneity has??
> both allowed the list to last for a long time, but also caused it to "ossify".??
> 
> Vesna had some good suggestions for organising small meetups and remote hubs,??
> and we talked about arranging meetings at in person events like Ars Electronica
> and Transmediale. Also we said these should be publicised so we are making??
> nettime an open space that new people can get involved in, regardless of if they
> like mailing lists or want to be part of the list.
> 
> I also raised the idea of doing more events on-list and off-list, such as a??
> 'show and tell' thread where people can just talk about what they're working on??
> at the moment, or having coffee calls where people can have a chat and get to??
> know other people in the community. Someone also mentioned the idea of inviting??
> people not on the list to write guest posts, which I like because it grows the
> community and allows us to explore the use of a mailing list as a publication??
> platform as well as just a space for connecting and discussing.
> 
> Probably there is a bunch of stuff I missed because I got distracted halfway??
> through, and then had to leave early, but I hope this is a useful summary for??
> the list! ???
> 
> [1] I actually missed that we have a Mastodon instance! It's at??
> <https://tldr.nettime.org/> if anyone is interested ????
> 
> Thanks,
> John (they/them)
> 

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