Cohousing-L Mailing List: Cohousing-L is 20 years old [20yr]

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

The Cohousing-L mailing list / discussion is 20 years old.
And it just keeps going.  When a day or two goes by occasionally
with few or no posts I wonder if we've fianlly run out of things
to talk about, but so far it comes back to life.

My son was a toddler when I started the list.  He graduated from
college last month and started his first full time job this week.
About a generation has passed. I am aware of a few individual
subscribers who have passed on during those 20 years.  The rest
of us are 20 years older.

Since 1994 there have been 300 or more subscribers.
The list has been fairly stable at around 800 subscribers
getting messages since Feb. 2007.

There is a history of cohousing-L at
http://l.cohousing.org/c-l-hist.htm

You can review and search any of the 35,000+ messages
that have been posted in 20 years at:
http://lists.cohousing.org/archives/cohousing-l/

The list's "Info page" is at:  http://cohousing.org/cohousing-L

I've enjoyed 20 years of managing cohousing-L. It has not generally
been a big time consuming task/project.  But more like cooking,
something that needs to be done every day, sometimes enjoyable,
sometimes not so much. Thank you for your part in making it the
useful discussion that it has been and continues to be.

One regret is that a few posters have not realized that this is a
public list - rather low profile in the scheme of things but public.
And as "privacy" is debated more this has become more significant.

We have encouraged posters to include their name and community,
anonymous venues are not nearly so civil and enjoyable, IMHO.
Cohousing-L has even taken on a bit of community-like feel.

Two top list related memories to me were:
o the 1999 trip to Denmark to see cohousing there that 8 of us took
  that the list played a role in launching.
o The listserv software snafu that resulted in a 80 spam messages
  being distributed to subscribers in 90 minutes (memorable tho not a
  good memory)  You can see details on this at:
  http://lists.cohousing.org/archives/cohousing-l/msg19492.html
  With that exception the list has been remarkably free of spam.

Fred, Cohousing-L listserv manager (and founder), http://justcomm.org

--
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
     Email:        fholson at cohousing.org      612-588-9532
My Link Pg: http://fholson.cohousing.org         My org:
Communications for Justice -- Free, superior listserv's w/o ads