On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Vitaliy wrote: > This post is in response to Bob Blick's post, "Re: [PIC] Simple rules about > behavior on the Piclist": I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying regarding the direction the piclist appears to be taking. However, this is not a democracy. If you want to take an active part in the direction of the PIClist, please offer your services as an admin/moderator - they have said in the past, "If you don't like the job I'm doing, come and help me with it" Telling them how to run the list, or having 'open discussions' in an attempt to gather opinions and possibly support isn't going to work one whit. Even though you single out Bob, there are other active admins and the content and direction of the list reflects all of their designs and desires - I'm quite certain that if they are unhappy with Bob's decisions they will have discussions with him to come to a consensus. But those discussion will only be between the moderators - this is not a democracy for the simple reason that meta-piclist threads would take over if everyone were involved in every single decision. Further, most of the decisions are, "Well, if you're willing to put up with the extra work you're causing, I'm not going to stand in your way." There's too much primary admin work to deal with to spend time on the fringe topics that either might or mightn't exist based on one admin's whims. There is always going to be a wide gray line where sometimes topics and posts are ok, and other times not. If you stay firmly on the PIC, EE, TECH side and keep a nice tone of voice you will rarely, if ever, be dinged. But if you choose to participate in OT topics, use rude language, etc, then there's always the possibility that you are within the gray area, and you might get hit by a passing mod. This moderation will necessarily happen unevenly - sometime you will find that you are dinged when other posts were not (or, at least, did not appear to be). Either it was dealt with offlist, or is was simply missed - there's a lot of traffic, and no single mod reads everything. I doubt that even with all the mods we get 100% coverage. It's pointless to compare a post you saw action on with a post you didn't see action on, especially when it's too late to take action on an older post. You were alerted when James was leaving, you saw that Bob was about to become an admin, and you chose not to volunteer then. Russel saw the same thing, and while he doesn't like his admin role, he was able to get the TECH topic started so that we have better defined divisions and allowance for non-PIC discussion. The last time we had a democratic vote onlist that was open as you prefer, you lost - Olin become permanantly unmoderated to the point where he can openly call people on list idiots and morons, participating in discussions where his only contributions are essentially "I'm not going to help you until you shape up," and generally being his brisque self. If you want to affect the direction of the list, you're going to have to work with the admins, and possibly join their ranks - I'm sure there's plenty of work to go around. But if we make this into a 'democracy' then we will necessarily have list politics constantly going on in the background, and they will occasionally engulf other topics. Better to keep it offlist where the dictators (benevolent or not, depending on one's subjective opinion) can work on it and let the list be the content. Good luck. -Adam -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist