[MD] the MOQ and its environment

[Case]

[m]
Greetings MOQ'ers

What do you think of the current MOQ environment?

What should be its purpose?

What would be an improvement?

[Case]
This subject comes up with some regularity and I always refrain from
commenting. I refrain mostly because it seems to me that any comment along
these lines could easily be construed as volunteering. But since these
discussions have proven so infective previously I feel empowered by inertia.


The current MoQ environment is tons of fun for those who participate. I like
it. Frankly I would not especially like to see it change at all. 

But:

As far as these discussions reaching a wider audience or being appealing to
people who do not want to actively participate; forget about it. If someone
finds Moq.org for example, it requires at least two addition mouse clicks to
get to the current discussion. That is assuming that you know which links to
click. Every time Jane Lunchbucket has to click a link the probability of
her leaving increases. If she has to look for where to click, the
probability goes up and if she has to look hard; forget about it.

Once you find the current discussions what you get is massive amounts of
incoherent conversation. Anyone who actually makes it to the archives has to
really, really want it. Finding useful information is very problematic. You
can search the archives but they are fragmented into clumps of years and
searching is done mainly by looking for specific words in posts. There is no
true indexing of the information. Surely there are seminal posts that could
be regarded as essential to understanding key concepts or key participants
in these discussions.

What the archives are in effect is trays full of slips. They can be accessed
or organized for random access in various ways that would probably show the
evolution and strands of thought that have evolved from this forum. Dan made
an excellent stab at creating order from the chaos with Lila's Child but a
book does not exploit the quality that can be derived from random access.

For example how many times has the hot stove been discussed over the past 10
years? If posts were indexed to various passages in ZMM and Lila we could
see which are the most often cited and discussed. Who are the most frequent
contributors to these discussions? The data is there it is just not readily
available.

While the site has many fine essays they are also tricky to find. I count
roughly 60 essays. If this has been going on for 10 years, which is about
one essay every two months. Is anyone reading these? I don't think we have
had that many added, at least not one every two month over the past two
years or so that I have been posting anyway.

Among the possible goals for improvement would be ways to improve access to
the archives for those serious about researching ideas and to create a venue
more accessible to those with a causal interest in the MoQ. 

Improving access to the archives would be a fairly massive undertaking but
creating a more user friendly popular venue for the MoQ is would be less so.
First of all for any site to be successful it has to have fresh content.
This site produces fresh content at a prodigious rate. However the content
has to be organized and edited so people can access it. Here are two
approaches that could work.

First is one a monthly or quarterly basis people could be asked to submit
candidates for the best posts of the period. Standard could be set for this
post in terms of their literary value, the quality of the observations made,
the structure of the posts etc. etc. These could be complied into a periodic
MoQ newsletter or magazine either of which could be accessed electronically
or printed.

The second would be some kind of system for rating posts on the site so that
newcomers could see which posts have been accessed most frequently and/or
what sort of Quality rating they receive. Of course one big problem with
this is that most of us participate through our e-mail clients and don't
really access the website. Perhaps if we had more reason to do so we would.

I could go on and on about this but the real point is that somebody actually
has to do something. People have to decide on tasks, workgroups need to be
formed to set editorial policies and set some rules. 

Beyond practical considerations there are legal issues to resolve. When we
make posts here but who owns them? If I want to use a series of posts that I
have participated in, what obligation is owed to the other correspondents?
If Platt lands a book deal to serialize his massive exchanges with Arlo is
Arlo entitled to a cut of the royalties. Dan had to remove certain threads
from Lila's Child because some of the participants in the forum did not want
to be in the book. Was he legally obligated to respect their wishes or was
this a matter of courtesy? 

There are no copyright notices or disclaimers or agreements about the
contents on the site that I can find. Are the legal rights to listserv posts
spelled out in the law?

If we were to develop a successful popular version of the MoQ would there be
profits involved? Would there need to be a formal organization? Who would be
in charge? Oh yeah, the whole power and control freak thing that has been
shot back and forth publicly and privately.

Lots of questions. 
Lots of work. 

That is the reason I have refrained from commenting previously, as noted
from the start. As I said, I like it the way it is but if there is going to
be a "next level" to this thing we are going to need some answers, some
commitments and God forbid some cooperation...

The "Treasure of Sierra Madre" should be required viewing for anyone who
gets involved.