Re: <nettime> Summary of today's meeting

This is all brilliant news. Kudos to John and the entire tech team!

Guest posts and meetups both online and off are very good ideas (Vesna has a lot of experience with that sort of thing). I think there were some nettime guest posts early on - in fact, Geert Lovink solicited a text from yours truly and that's how I got into this. Jordan Crandall's early lists were run entirely that way, and it was very stimulating.

There's an outstanding question about the scope of nettime today. On the one hand it doesn't matter - nust post what you like. However, Geert's notion of an "immanent critique of the networks" was a very strong and productive one. My sense is that as time has gone on, and the network society has become, not a theory or a possibility, but something like a total social fact, nettime's immanent critique has become general cultural critique. Obviously I'm comfortable with that - or guilty of it from another perspective - but it would be interesting to hear what the new mods, and really everybody, thinks about it.

Thanks again for the report, John.

All best from Vashon Island,

Brian

On Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 08:30 John Preston via Nettime-tmp <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi all,

Here is a longform summary of the synchronous meeting held today.

There is general agreement to move to servus.at as the new host for the
mailing list. They have about 2000 email accounts and a few hundred mailing
lists so there are no concerns about management or scale.

We talked about problems with bots, and they are currently working on a
solution.

After the move, the intention for signup process seems to be to keep it the
same as it is now: users have to confirm their email via a link, and then be
manually approved by a moderator. We think this is currently scalable, effective
for managing spam, and gives mod team a feel for "who's coming and going", which
is nice to know.

We expect the move to take a couple of weeks, and there was some discussion
about when is a good time to do this, given it's summer now. Eventually the
archive and website will move as well, but probably that will happen after the
new list is established.

An initial pool of new moderators is now being formed and I think people will
meet again soon to organise this. I think Jordan, Christian, and Menno expressed
interest in joining the new mod squad.

We also talked about pruning the subscriber list and figuring out how best to
coordinate the move. This is an open question for the mod team to figure out
what to do, but there were suggestions of using the invitation function on the
new list to send out invites to everyone with activity in the last year, as a
way to make sure the most active members are able to migrate effectively, and
find a balance with just resubscribing lots of people who maybe don't want to
be on the list.

There was brief discussion about using the nettime.org domain name for the
mailing list, and this is still an open question. Ted would like to maintain
ownership for now and act as a guarantor, since it also points to other services
like our website and the Mastodon instance [1]. Overall there did not seem to
be much concern either way in terms of the mailing list, as we expect host
moves to be few and far between.

We also talked about the role of moderation on the list, and making sure this is
also about creating energy in the list, and bringing new people into the space.
Ted pointed out that diversity is an issue for nettime, as the homogeneity has
both allowed the list to last for a long time, but also caused it to "ossify".

Vesna had some good suggestions for organising small meetups and remote hubs,
and we talked about arranging meetings at in person events like Ars Electronica
and Transmediale. Also we said these should be publicised so we are making
nettime an open space that new people can get involved in, regardless of if they
like mailing lists or want to be part of the list.

I also raised the idea of doing more events on-list and off-list, such as a
'show and tell' thread where people can just talk about what they're working on
at the moment, or having coffee calls where people can have a chat and get to
know other people in the community. Someone also mentioned the idea of inviting
people not on the list to write guest posts, which I like because it grows the
community and allows us to explore the use of a mailing list as a publication
platform as well as just a space for connecting and discussing.

Probably there is a bunch of stuff I missed because I got distracted halfway
through, and then had to leave early, but I hope this is a useful summary for
the list! ❤

[1] I actually missed that we have a Mastodon instance! It's at
<https://tldr.nettime.org/> if anyone is interested 🙂

Thanks,
John (they/them)

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