Cohousing-L Mailing List: Moving Cohousing-L - a bigger issue?

[Fred H Olson WB0YQM (fholson]

This message is really from Fred unlike all the forwarded messages
lately, a problem I hope to fix when we move.

As I've previously mentioned on cohousing-L, the list will be moving
to a listserver at a site other than uci.com where it has been for 3 years.
Our target date for this move has been the end on 1995.  To date I have not
made it a prominent topic on cohousing-L because it seemed like a rather
technical issue - any reasonable listproc server (my preference) with
browsable archives (not all that common yet) would do.  Several
alternatives have been found.  An alternative that looks very attractive
to us is to move to the site of the organization Communications for
a Sustainable Future which currently hosts about 24 mailing list
with associated www pages on the topics  ecology,
progressive/experiential education, progressive sociology, sustainable
economics, bioregionalism, peace-and-conflict studies, ...
The new list on Bioregionalism was announced recently on Cohousing-L
is at CSF.

An issue has arisen with respect to our possible move which could have
broader implications for Cohousing on the Internet and even the emerging
Cohousing Network (see below).  Hence I'm posting a summary here to
give others an opportunity to join in the discussion.  I'd prefer not
to divert cohousing-L discussion to this "meta-topic" so please
email me directly with follow-ups (see also below).

CSF has taken the position (briefly paraphrased) that they are
enthusiastic about cohousing-L moving to CSF but they dont want our list
unless we bring our WWW (physically) to CSF also.  We dont quite
understand the significance of the physical co-location requirement; we
are basically of the opinion that we could have adequate integration of
our site and their's using distributed www architecture and keep our www
stuff on the computer at ucdavis where our www developer (Stuart) works
which he finds convenient.  (Essentially this would result in the our
and their collective web pages appearing the same as if ours were at CSF
except the URL's to stuff at ucdavis would say ucdavis (or possibly
cohousing.org) instead of csf. Their would be some minimally increased
delays when following links between the two compared to if they were all
at csf.)

I (Fred) have made a commitment to negotiate a compromise to this so
that we can make the move and am hopeful that we can work it out.

CSF feels (again briefly) that the level of cooperation between CSF and
it's constituent organizations whose lists it hosts and CSF's future
electronic publishing house plans require the WWW pages be at CSF.  CSF is
also of the opinion that list hosting requires a relatively large amounts
of resources and headaches while the WWW has the most "glamour". Glamour
is Fred's shorthand for the aspect of WWW that has the most potential to
build the stature and Internet presence of an organization.

The Cohousing Network is the under development national cohousing
organization which will eventually "own" cohousing-L , the cohousing WWW
pages currently located at ucdavis as well as the (paper) Cohousing
Journal and sponsor the National Cohousing Conference). In any case the
Cohousing Network would retain "ownership" of the list, it's archives
and the cohousing www and it's contents if we move everything to CSF.

The discussion of these issues has primarily taken place between Don Roper
of CSF and Fred and the "subscribers" of the small "ehouse" mailing list
that has been cohousing-L's informal leadership / administrative list
for a while now.  Ehouse is open to cohousing-L participants by request;
send a note to Stuart Stanifor-Chen stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu
or Fred Olson (fholson [at] uci.com).

Fred



--
Fred H. Olson   fholson [at] uci.com   (612)588-9532  Amateur radio: WB0YQM
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