Since I have just returned to moderating this mailing list, it's
a good time to tell you about why I am doing the work and
what my own view of the issues is. If you are just interested
in the facts and don't care about personalities, go ahead and
hit your delete key. This mail is for people who are curious
about their moderator is and the criteria that drive the list.
How I got to be moderator
There was no great search committee or democratic process
involved. Richard K. Moore started this list for Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility and moderated it for about
three months. He knew me from some help I'd given on some
documents, and when he went on vacation I volunteered to moderate
for a while. Then we discovered that I liked doing it and that he
was busier than he originally thought, so I kept moderating until
my auto accident last November.
Still, I have some qualifications for moderator. I've been a
member of CPSR for six or seven years and helped to organize some
events in the Boston area; I've talked to many leading members and
absorbed the positions of the organization, which has spent years
developing an advanced and comprehensive position on policies
regarding the information infrastructure.
What I want from this group
You should be informed that I have high expectations for this
mailing list; there are a lot of issues I want us to cover. If
your goals and philosophy are a lot different from mine, don't
worry--my main goal is to bring together people with many
different goals and philosophies! All to have productive
discussions of the rights enumerated on our Web page.
It makes me excited to hear people hold social and political
discussions, developing their positions and deciding to take
action. This is the one of the highest forms of participation in
society. And this mailing list is an example of how it can be
done with great efficiency and a sense of inclusion. To see
computers and telecom equipment used in pursuit of that goal seems
much more significant than to lull the masses through light
entertainment or to transfer records from one bureaucracy to
another--although I have no quarrel with people wanting to do
those things too.
I think our sense of culture and community will be built more and
more through electronic media in the decades to come, and I'd like
the environment to support talks like we have here. That is, our
type of communication should not be excluded from the network of
the future. As you all know from postings on this group, the
danger of exclusion is great.
We've heard lots about censorship. I don't want to trivialize
that problem, but I want us to branch out toward other (more
complex and more multi-sided) issues of economic development and
its social consequences. The U.S. telecommunications reform bill
brought all the issues to the fore, and we were not that well
prepared to intervene.
Who will control what people get to see on their TVs and to hear
on their telephone lines? Where will the money come from to
create content and to deliver it? Will we be able to connect to
each other as one huge community, or will we be sectioned off into
separate groups (with access denied to some)?
I consider places of public congregation and discussion, including
channels of communication, as critical public goods that require
protection and good management. This is not the dominant view
nowadays. More people say that companies should create and own
the media and that market forces will create the best possible
media in terms of costs and functions. But whatever your point of
view, it is worth discussing what you want the media to offer and
support. We will have to live not only with, but in, whatever
develops.
What this mailing list can accomplish
On this list we engage in discussion, but discussion should lead
to action. Each of us should decide what we want to do and how
much effort each of us can put in. I'd like to remind you all
that CPSR furnishes the resources for this mailing list, so I see
it as a place to help CPSR develop its positions. While our main
direction has been laid out in CPSR papers and newsletters,
dissenting voices are very important to help us avoid going down
dead-end alleys out of ideological purity.
This is not an action list, however. Every once in a while
someone tries to get people to work together toward some practical
action, and not much response comes back. I think the list is too
loose and casual to be a place for developing tactical approaches.
Furthermore, we have to keep traffic on the list down, and
therefore cannot devote a lot of space to tactical organization
around any one issue. Instead, people who are energetic enough to
lead a campaign should ask here for people interested in
participating to join a smaller group that can exchange mail
frequently and take action flexibly.
My other activities
At my day job, I'm an editor at O'Reilly & Associates. We are a
publisher (mostly of computer books) who started in UNIX, went on
to publish books on the X Window System, put out the first
best-selling book about the Internet ("The Whole Internet" by Ed
Krol), and have since branched off into many other areas.
While none of that sounds particularly political, there is a basic
ethical approach to our authors and our readers that I hope
matches what I'm trying to do with the Cyber Rights mailing list.
We have become known as honest purveyors of information, a place
people can go to find out how a computer system really works
without hype or fudging. To deal with systems as they really
work, that is my goal both at work and on this list. If you want
to see more about me personally, check out
http://jasper.ora.com/andyo/professional.
Andy
~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
Posted by Andrew Oram - •••@••.••• - Moderator: CYBER-RIGHTS (CPSR)
Cyber-Rights: http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/
ftp://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/library/
CyberJournal: (WWW or FTP) --> ftp://ftp.iol.ie/users/rkmoore
Materials may be reposted in their _entirety_ for non-commercial use.
~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
