Uh, if you mark something as "off-list" you should maybe also not send it to the list afterwards. Sorry for having continued this thread, I shall shut up now.
On 9/5/06, Michael Bimmler mbimmler@gmail.com wrote:
Off-list-reply, following Aphaia's plea
On 9/5/06, Jeff V. Merkey jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com wrote:
Michael Bimmler wrote:
If you have a high-priority and/or important business question, which you want to be answered by nobody but Foundation officials, why don't you just write an email to the Foundation? There is board at wikimedia dot org and bpatrick at wikimedia dot org (Brad Patrick, general counsel & Interim Executive Director WMF) for your convenience.
I do this all the time with Brad and those emails dont make it to this list.
Well, okay, so you can handle your questions with Brad and everything is fine. Why do send them to the list then?
I don't think that you can prohibit community members from expressing themselves when using a mailing list. There is private email for business purposes.
I am not trying to prohibit anyone from expressing themselves, in fact, it's the other way around, I am often the target of folks oppressing my expressions for purely political reasons.
It might rather be for on-/offtopic reasons...
I have no problem using the foundation list for progress on African languages and other programs, but a business oriented list would be a better solution. The problem with the community moderator concept here is there may be other businesses spring up and when a non-employee threatens to moderate or does moderate someone on such a list, there are some issues potentially created for the foundation. Issues I would rather not deal with.
I beg your pardon? Are you implying that the foundation may get legal problems (my translation of your word "issue") as they allow experienced members (not everybody gets list-moderator...) to moderate the mailinglists? If the Foundation decides. that its mailing list shall rather be administered by volunteers chosen by them than by e.g. office employees, I don't see any problem in that solution. And if these volunteer admins hence moderate or threaten to moderate posts to the lists, they are just using the powers given to them by the Foundation. If serious concerns about the actions of a list admin are raised, they will reach the foundation and the foundation *might* if they deem it appropriate consider the removal of the administrator functions of the user in question. As said, this is quite unlikely, as the list administrators are without exception distinguished users. So I see no problem whatsoever with having non-foundation-employees administering this list.
Michael