[gopher] Gopher Community Infrastructure...

[Bradley D. Thornton]

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


---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus