Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing-L tailing off

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

On Sun, 23 Mar 1997, Joani Blank wrote:

> 
> 2. If, as Fred tells us, there are actually more subscribers than ever,

Joani, I swear on a stack of Cohousing books that we are at a peak on the 
number of subscribers :)  

But a few clarifications:

We're probably also at a peak in the number of postponed members (88)
who dont get messages by email.  Among these are IGC.ORG (Peacenet etc)
folks who read messages in a local IGC conference.  There are also postponed
addresses that had delivery problems and the listserve psoponed 'em.

Not everyone who gets messages reads them completely (hope I'm not
disallusioning anyone here :) . 

On one end of the range are folks who subscribed years ago when they
thought cohousing was interesting but never got around to unsubscribing
when they lost interest.  (Some people have more disk space than
housekeeping round tuits :)

Some folks (like me) get around to reading some Cohousing-L messages and
responding to even few. (Actually I'm an advocate of selective reading as 
a way of dealing with information overload.)

I like the idea of offering interactive opportunities to people who 
may not want to post to the whole list.

LOWER LIST VOLUME IS NOT A PROBLEM
I feel the need to repeat a line from my original response (based
on one misinterpretation of it:
fo> I have not felt the smaller volume of messages was a problem.               

WEB RESOURCES AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR LIST VOLUME

Judy's response suggested the various archives were a factor.
Tho these archives could be much better maintained they can be 
useful - the CSF WWW format archives (the last year or so) are now 
searchable.  I wish the gopher format archeves were searchable.

Beyond these however it seems like we could put more on the web and then 
use the list to announce and remind folks of these resources.
For example the object of Joani's suggestion:

>Re-read Rob Sandelin's inspirational note from a couple of weeks back on
>why groups fail and what to do to prevent it.  (Rob, how about posting that
>from time to time to give us all a kick in the butt.)

could be achieved by posting Rob's note on the web and Joani (or anyone)
periodically mentioning it and it's url on the list.


I assume that by now most cohousing-L subscribers can easily access the web.
I wish we had a good way to survey subscribers...  How about subscribers
who DO NOT have easy access to the web send me a note  at 
fholson [at] cohousing.org with the subject (in caps) NO WWW ACCESS ?
I'll try to report the number (if any) of responses to the list.

Fred

> Joani Blank
> jeblank [at] hooked.net
> Doyle St. CoHousing and Old Oakland CoHousing at Swan's Market
> 
> 

--
Fred H. Olson  fholson [at] tc.umn.edu  (612)588-9532  Amateur radio: WB0YQM 
List manager of  Nbhd-tc (Twin Cities Neighborhood issues)  and
Cohousing-L (see http://www.cohousing.org )