[GSBN] private vs public archives

[Bill Christensen]

Ok... these are legitimate concerns.

I suppose I could set up a separate area for those discussions which 
warrant privacy.  It's not a huge amount of work to do that.  Keeping 
the subscriber list current might be a mild annoyance, especially as 
the list grows in size...

Jorge Van Krieken, our new member from Portugal, emailed me off list 
after reading some of the recent archives with the suggestion that we 
go with a web-based forum, which could have private areas and public 
areas.  My response was that in my experience, busy people such as 
those on this list tend to NOT use web based forums as doing so 
typically requires at least the extra step of logging in to the web 
forum, and doing that tends to get put off until some mythical 
"later".   We read email, knock out a quick (or in some cases, 
thoughtful) reply, and move on to the next email.   Also, a number of 
our users are still on dialup (as far as I know), which compounds the 
problem.

Personally, I use web forums a lot.  But I use them mostly to answer 
specific questions, and once those questions are answered I may not 
log in for months.  I'm not currently aware of any web forums which 
allow both the sending of all forum posts to the subscribers' email 
AND allow members to reliably and securely post TO the forum by email.

At the very least a web forum would be able to send an email to 
everyone letting them know that there's a new discussion in progress, 
and usuallly can be set up to send the posts' contents out by email. 
Then if someone had an opinion or other discussion they'd have to log 
in to throw in their two cents.

It's also possible for me to set up a parallel email list 
specifically for private discussions, with members-only archives.

It's a similar amount of work to set up either.  Do any of you have 
any particular objections to or interests in seeing one or the other?



At 5:53 PM -0800 11/12/09, stoneandstraw wrote:
>Bill,
>
>My only concern, and it is a minor one, is that without the ability 
>to have a "private" conversation among those on the list (all 
>together), the nomination of a new member to the list is really a 
>selection of that person by the nominator.  IOW, if anyone did have 
>reservations about John Dough's nomination, would they express them, 
>knowing that John Dough and everyone else would eventually see those 
>thoughts?
>This is, as I said, a minor issue mostly because before any of us 
>nominate a new "member," we are pretty good about vetting the 
>appropriateness of the candidate ourselves.  However, the situation 
>could arise where some very bad and telling experiences with a 
>candidate might only be known to 2-3 members, and that candidate 
>could then be nominated by one of us who is ignorant of the negative 
>experiences. 
>For example, I had a reasonably good experience with a straw bale 
>builder, about whom others on this list knew of some pretty 
>poor experiences.  ...experiences that showed this person did not 
>really have (1) the level of expertise claimed, (2) the 
>commitment to improving overall construction quality, nor (3) a 
>desire to share and learn as a community.  It was only because of a 
>casual conversation at a CASBA meeting that I found out of the rest 
>of the story.  If I were to have nominated this person (in my 
>ignorance), I doubt that my well-mannered colleagues would have 
>spoken up against the nomination - even though they probably should. 
>
>Just my $0.02 worth.
>Nehemiah
>
>

-- 
Bill Christensen
billc at greenbuilder.com

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