Re: [xml-dev] XML-DEV Directors

[AndrewWatt2000@aol.com]

In a message dated 15/03/2003 22:49:24 GMT Standard Time, donpark@docuverse.com writes:


> If XML-DEV is a child,


Don, 

XML-Dev is less like a child than almost any other mailing list I have belonged to.

We are not a bunch of helpless, inarticulate, passive people ... as the ... um ... liveliness of debate on the list often shows. :)

 its an orphan for its parents are gone and there is no one to give TLC and worry 
> about its future.  OASIS is, in this analogy, an orphanage that provides just food and a place to sleep.  What we heard from Karl Best is what an orphan is expected to hear after complaining loudly about the quality of food and missing meals.
>
>  
>
> XML-DEV have no website to call its own where XML-DEV members can contribute to. 


Has an XML-Dev website ever been seriously proposed or discussed?

Why would we need/want one? What would it be for?

> We have no polling facility. 

We rarely, as far as I am aware, do anything sufficiently project-orientated to require a poll.

 Member extensible FAQ using Wiki could have helped 
> turn permathreads into something more valuable than time-waster, 


A Wiki might be interesting but, personally, I doubt if a Wiki would get rid of all of the so-called permathreads.

I tend to imagine that permathreads are an indication, however indirect, of unresolved issues.

but OASIS is not in a position to think about our unasked for yet necessary needs.  
> All they provide is food and bed, not what we want, need, and think about. 


Really?

 That is what parents are for and we lost our parents when Peter and Henry left.  
> Now no one can make decisions, not even respected peers like Tim Bray, because there is no authority.


My view on the recent issue raised by Tim is that the way he raised it did his case a significant disservice. A temper tantrum / childish rant / burst of frustration (however honestly felt) is not in itself a basis for disrupting the list, in my view, whoever its source might be.

Tim put forward a view and, like many ideas put forward on this list, it was examined and some of its deficiencies pointed out.

That, in my experience, is how XML-Dev works. Ideas are put forward. Good ideas which are well-expressed survive and may grow. Poor ideas or poorly expressed ideas tend to be batted back to their originator. It doesn't, and shouldn't, matter who the originator is.


>  
>
> What I want is a small group of member nominated and informally elected directors, 7 should suffice, to take care of XML-DEV presently and plan for its future. 


Hm

 Beyond monthly online meetings to discuss and plan, directors should moderate 
> when a thread gets too heated, shifts topic. or turns into a permathread.


Hm. In my experience when threads get heated the participants tend to exhaust each other, given time.

What you suggest seems, to me at least, to be unrealistic and unwelcome paternalism.

I have been on many tightly paternalistically moderated lists in the past. They usually wither or die, because they are frustrating fora in which to seriously discuss issues or they become, however overtly or subtly, a channel for the moderators' ... or should that be extremists'? :) ... point of view.

  If a director burns out, he or she can resign and another director can be elected.  
> Elections can take place annually to avoid that situation in the first place.  Even if we stay at OASIS, we still need to have something like the directors.


I don't see this as a "need". 

> Without hands to hold and guide us together, we are just grains of sands at the mercy of winds.


Um ... if you say so. :)

My view on this is that if XML-Dev becomes the passive, dependent, orphaned child which needs parental nurturing then it loses, or has lost, much of its intrinsic character which makes it such a useful and, at times, invigorating mailing list.

Andrew Watt