[Noisebridge-discuss] Enlightenment & its discontents (response to Rachel, Jim, Frantisek et al)

rachel lyra hospodar rachelyra at gmail.com
Sat Aug 18 19:31:59 UTC 2012


Hi Tony,

Thanks for working to engage in a considered way on this issue!  It's
a really uncomfortable but necessary one!  Regrets for any lack of
clarity around the way I read nb-discuss, some more details and some
thoughts on why I shared the fact of the filtering:

I use this email address for mailing lists, I belong to many.  Mailing
lists are, to me, still the single most fungible and successful tool
for creating online communities.  By filtering mail from certain lists
to certain folders, I am able to subscribe to many high-volume lists
and scores of low-volume lists without having undifferentiated chaos
in my inbox.

I am deeply interested in the metacognitive repercussions of the
"sortability" of electronic commmunications.  For example, I have six
or seven arduino and microcontroller-specific mailing lists that all
sort into one shared folder.  This way, when I am working on
electronics or seeking to delve into the topic further, I have one
really rich place where all those email inputs are collected.  It is
interesting to me the way this creates a psychologically real 'bounded
space' that is functionally identical to a room full of people.  I put
Michael Shiloh and the amarino toolkit list into the same room because
I want to read them at the same time.

I put sustainability interest groups and lists together, small
business & neighborhood localization lists together, etc.  I actually
send nb-discuss, nb-announce, and all of my noisebridge sublists to
the same folder.  Which I read regularly.

Sometimes, when someone is still getting their shit together on how to
setup their list, they will put me on but then the way the emails
comes in varies so much I have to make a number of different filters
to keep them in the correct folder and out of in the main inbox.  Then
I sometimes solve the problem by filtering all of that person's emails
to the right place.  Their incompetent netiquette loses them their
access to my primary inbox.  Some people go one step up the ladder and
issue new email addresses for each list they are on, so they can track
who shares their address and if needed remove the offenders' ability
to reach them at all.  Once I set up some more stuff I might go
further down this route, but for now I only do this in a few cases.

I have done this here as a metacognitive hack to place these
interactions with Frantisek back into the public sphere.  I am sharing
that I have done it, as a way of documenting the hack and
open-sourcing it.

> good guys, too. This awkward discussion could lead to something
> enlightening, purrr haps?

That's my hypothesis, and is of course the reason I initiated and I am
forcing the continuation of the conversation even though it is
awkward.  I wish I thought that you had noticed this congruency,
instead of this sentence reading to me as a piece of advice.  But hey,
maybe it's not even advice or maybe it's advice that is not directed
at me, and you are agreeing with me and stating your good opinion of
my solution.

I can only hope that over time support of and agreeance with the
specific actions I am taking in this realm would be more often stated
explicitly rather than implicitly.  It really speeds up the adoption
of the technologies I am building.

hey, a girl can dream, can't she?

R.

On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 11:24 AM, Tony Longshanks LeTigre
<anthonyletigre at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rachel Lyra wrote:
> Frantisek emailed me privately, but I am responding publicly.
>
> The text of his email is included below. I've done this before....once,
> twice, three times maybe? When I felt someone has sent me something
> privately that should be addressed by the community at large. In such cases
> I don't ask permission, the same way I don't always ask permission when
> borrowing things from the web for zines I make. I believe in taking what you
> need, to a certain point. I accept a certain amount of "being taken from" as
> "That's Life," by the same token. I'm aware when posting a private message
> publicly that it is a breach of the usual protocol & therefore reserved for
> certain (usually heated) occasions. I've also done it in the past knowing
> (to my annoyance) that it would be dismissed as "stirring up drama," since I
> know I was branded that way at a time when there was a lot of inappropriate
> shit happening @ Noisebridge that I was calling people on. (I solved that
> problem by making my visits to NB more sporadic & usually not staying very
> long.)
>
> One thing I don't get, Rachel, is that you said you don't as a rule read
> NB-Discuss posts, you filter them to your junk bin, is that correct? I
> suppose the majority of NB-Discuss posts aren't worth your time, but it does
> strike me as a little arrogant that you deign to engender (ha!) a dialogue
> on a mailing list that you otherwise ignore. How do you know others aren't
> starting dialogues on similarly important matters the rest of the time?
>
> Perhaps I misunderstand you. I agree with much of what you're saying & even
> relate to your fierce attitude in a lot of ways. I think Frantisek & Jim are
> good guys, too. This awkward discussion could lead to something
> enlightening, purrr haps?
>
>
> Yr friendly neighborhood Tiger
>
>
>



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