From: Steve Jones <sjones@uic.edu>
In any event, my strong feeling has always been that the best lists are self-organizing and self-sustaining. I would strongly prefer that we refrain from filtering, making rules, etc., at the "executive" level of AoIR, and allow the list to function as it will.
This is a false contradiction. Moderating a list is an art in itself and is unrelated to censoring and only further enhances the capacity of a community to self-organize. Moderation, or I prefer the more precise term facilitation means that there is a person or group which is taking care of the direction of a list. This activity is absolutely unrelated to "rule making" or "censorship" and I really surprised to see that so many Internet researchers on AIR are still mixing up these two things. The general level of the AIR list has been low, really low, with the exception of a few treads (I really like the virtual community one). I am specially saying that because the intellectual level of the subscribers is so high. Internet researchers should have debates on really high level, in my view, knowing how to use the tools they are supposed to be an expert in. If I look at AIR and compare it to other lists, the result is really low, specially over theoretical and methodological issues. However, this is all REALLY easy to change. As long as this board keeps is its slack libertarian anything-goes and let-it-all-happen go-with-the-flow mentality, I don't see that many us will invent a lot of time and intellectual energy in this forum. This has got NOTHING to do with 'censorship' or 'moderation' of individual messages but everything with vision and a common passion to lift the general level of the conversation and information exchange. Like anything lists need to be taken care of, otherwise they decay and do not reach their full, critical potential. I would therefor propose that a small group start to take of the AIR list in order to give a direction. It's really worth because there is a lot of potential here and I sense from this debate that we are not really using it. Ciao, Geert