[gopher] History and future of "the gopher project"

[kaltheat at googlemail.com]

Hi,

On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 09:56:10AM +0100, Mateusz Viste wrote:
> In fact, I think you understood the gopher "project" as something more 
> than it actually is.
> 
> "gopher-project" is the name of this mailing list, but it might just as 
> well be named "gopher-community". There is no project per se, other than 
> gathering a community together which shares a passion for Gopher.

Actually this is what it seems to me, too. But then I stumbled over the
domain gopherproject.org and other places[1][2][3] where they use the term
"gopher project" as if it meant more in the past.
Unable to find details of this "more" I thought it might me a good idea
to ask people beeing involved in the "project" for longer ...

And if it meant more in the past why couldn't it mean more in the future
than just being a mailing list?

On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 12:41:44AM +0200, Ciprian Dorin Craciun wrote:
> Although there are plenty of people on this mailing list that could
> better answer your question, I can point you to my Gopher "notes", a
> collection of links related to Gopher that I've gathered.
>
>     http://wiki.volution.ro/CiprianDorinCraciun/Notes/Public/Gopher

This is a nice collection! Thank you for sharing the address.

It's a nice collection among other similiar collections spread all over
gopherspace. And this is another fact that drove me to the idea of a
"gopher project" meaning more (in future?) than it means now. The future
gopher project could provide a gopherhole which covers gopher history at
one place, which could be a good entry point for new users, ...

I imagine that there are quite some people in gopherspace (like Goerzen,
Kaiser) who had/have the wish to preserve gopher history. But what
prevents them/us to collect and provide it in one place (something like
pooling the forces)? If this was done by a project, it kind of abstracts
from the real people that do it. Let's imagine a certain scenario: A
person has no spare time anymore or has no fun anymore in contributing
to the project (like running gopherbot for instance, whatever), s/he
could tell the project and it could find another person willing to do
the work ...

Regards,
kealtheat

[1] http://gopher.quux.org:70/Software/Gopher
[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1689
[3] http://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm