I personally don't feel that discussions about the future of Project Gutenberg are out of place here. After all, most of the future direction of PG depends on the volunteers. I also don't feel that Jon has been especially inflammatory in his writings. As Josh said, it's easy to get sucked into a flame war with bowerbird (I am also guilty of posting a couple messages that served no purpose other than that of making a bad situation worse), but I feel that the many contributions of Jon to this list outweigh his small laps in judgement. Also, for those of you who don't remember, it's not a question of whether or not we should ban bowerbird. That decision was already made by Greg. Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an accidental oversight, when the list was moved to the new server, that ban was not moved with it. The other mistake was made when that ban was not put back in place once it was realized that it had been omitted. Of course, this is all speculation, and I might be way off on my reasoning. Sincerely Aaron Cannon At 08:27 PM 5/15/2005, you wrote:
Josh wrote:
Jim Tinsley wrote:
How say the rest of you -- should we erase the graffiti?
Well, I think we can all agree most of the problem is one particular person. As someone who has been "dragged into a mudfight" with this person before, I know how easy it is. All of his negative qualities not-withstanding ... he is an amazingly good troll.
Jon, while in this instance is posting a high noise-to-signal ratio, has on many occasions posted some very well thoughtout and useful information. While some out there may disagree with how far he wants PG to go on the meta-data front, he has some very good ideas in this area and has shown a willingness to discuss constructively.
As Melissa pointed out, and which was very insightful, just parsing the name of 'gutvol-d' means it is a general discussion list for PG volunteers. It does appear the original charter for the group is for those who are active PG volunteers to "talk shop". That is, to talk about how to handle issues met today in doing volunteer work for PG, whatever it may be. (Such as "how do I do this?").
This probably should not include, in hindsight, some of my messages which mostly deal with "where should PG go in the future" or the related "how should PG change to meet new goals" type of messages. I apologize to everyone here for not staying within the charter for gutvol-d.
Now Greg did start another group to discuss what I think are "organizational/governance" issues. (The name of that group eludes me -- it's been pretty inactive for quite a while.) I'm not sure if the "future-oriented" ideas are intended to fit into that group -- I sort of think not. If not, then a new group, maybe called 'gutfuture', could be created to discuss these types of thoughts, ideas and proposals.
Jon
(p.s., thanks Josh.)
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