North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@bellsouth.net>]

On 12/20/2011 11:08 AM, david.maxwell@dal.ca wrote:

> of NAFEX).  They lucked into ibiblio as a host for their new forum.  (Ibiblio 
> has nothing
> whatsoever to do with NAFEX, or indeed any other of the hundreds of special 
> interest groups
> who use their - free -  service.  It is a public service run by "a 
> collaboration of the Center for
> the Public Domain and The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill".  They 
> take no interest
> in the actual content, but provide the infrastructure to host the storage and 
> distribution of this
> content.  Now, the forum was to serve the function of information exchange 
> for NAFEX
> members, so it was, quite reasonably, named "nafex.iblio".  However, owing to 
> the nature of
> ibiblio, which is completely open, subscriptions to the forum were not 
> restricted to dues-

The original NAFEX forum was on Yahoo which turned out not to be a very 
useful host. After talking with Greg Miller and Ginda Fisher I 
volunteered to have ibiblio create a new mailing list for NAFEX to 
replace the one at Yahoo. Ginda sent me the message archives and I sent 
those to ibiblio who created the list and installed the archives for us 
to build on. I started the list and share ownership of it. ibiblio hosts 
it. ibiblio has no involvement with any of their lists other than making 
sure they work properly and are secure and backed up and are used within 
legal bounds.

<...>

> Now we get to the meat.  My own feeling is that a listserv serves this 
> specific need better
> than a web-based forum which requires logging in, and Midfex might be wise to 
> let NAFEX
> be the test of this.  That is, wait awhile before going down this road, and 
> see whether NAFEX

<...>

> actually can make a go of it.  And, no, "the NAFEX administrator" is not 
> planning anything
> one way or another in terms of keeping the iblio forum going, because it is 
> not hers to
> exercise any control of.  It belongs to ibiblio, and they have neither 
> incentive to make any
> changes, nor expressed intention of doing so.

ibiblio exercises no control over their lists other than technical and 
legal. In other words ibiblio has no involvement with this list other 
than that. They have neither the time or staff to oversee the day to day 
workings of their lists. Also, they are currently not accepting any more 
requests for lists to be hosted by them, so, what is there now is all 
there ever will be and the names of those existing lists can not be 
changed; they either continue or are deleted at the request of list 
owners. Everything else is the responsibility of the list owners, in 
this case I and one other person, as Sherwin owns his.

> And, as a wholly gratuitous comment, my personal feeling is that NAFEX, (and 
> Midfex!) might
> be better carving out a "market" in things that are not served by any other 
> entity, rather than
> trying to compete for a function that may be better served by some other 
> entity.

There are plenty of ways that this list can collaborate and cooperate 
with NAFEX for its benefit as well as that of the list community. I have 
written Deb about this, posted here, and am ready to do whatever is needed.

Using this list (mailing list, forum, listserv, etc.) is accomplished 
using three simple procedures:

1) point your email to the mailing list or privately to any subscribers
2) point your web browser to the message archives at the list homepage
3) point your search criteria to the Google search box in your web browser

Another fruit-less post.

Merry Christmas to all.

Lawrence London