[MD] the MOQ and its environment

[MarshaV]

Hi Gav,

Thanks for taking so much time to respond.  The original questions 
concerning the environment were posed by Kevin from a post dated 
2/14/2007 At 12:36 PM.   I restated, maybe poorly, his original questions:

>
>Hello Marsha.  Thanks for asking.  I would suggest looking at the 
>MOQ's current
>environment.
>
>What I found interesting were the words, "putting the MOQ."  They make the
>MOQ look like a thing that has an environment that can be 
>controlled, e.g., if it
>were given over to academia then it would be affected by the academic
>environment or if it is kept here it would not be affected by this 
>or if we put it there
>it won't be affected by that.
>
>How is the MOQ's current environment affecting its evolution?
>

I hope Kevin will respond to your post.

m



At 11:36 AM 2/17/2007, Gav wrote:
>[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.
>
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