Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Re: minutes - computers help

[Raines Cohen (raines-coho-L]

"Rob Sandelin" <floriferous [at] msn.com> wrote on 9/7/01

>Just to throw in a small warning to those to entrust electronics as their
>only means of record keeping, Sharingwood lost about a year and a half worth
>of minutes when a virus destroyed the computer they were stored on. No tape
>back ups were available (because that cost more to do. The records lost
>contained several decisions which of course no one accurately remembers.
>
>So now we also keep a printed copy in a file in a pretty fireproof place.

Another approach is to make sure that every document is emailed out to 
everybody in the group, so that collectors like me are bound to keep a 
copy around (yes, I have 5205 messages in my 'Swan's Coho' folder, dating 
back to 8/97). Build redundancy into the system, and take advantage of 
your existing network of people! Hard disks are now dirt-cheap... tens of 
dollars per gigabyte.. allocate some group $ to get some every so often 
and set up automatic backups.

Even better: publish your decisions on the web, for other groups (and 
potential members of your community) to learn from AND for automatic web 
crawlers to index and back up for you! If privacy is an issue, redact the 
names from the public version.

>Rob Sandelin
>Sharingwood Archivist (a role that is useful after your community has been
>around awhile)

This may be more of a work-roles and task-allocation / group-management 
question, but what do you do when your archivist has had no visible signs 
of [archive-related] activity for a while?

Raines

Raines Cohen <coho-L [at] raines.com> <http://www.swansway.com/>
Back from Burning Man in one (unburned) piece, happy to report. Getting 
some Open Space Technology training next week.

  Vice President, Swan's Market Cohousing [Old Oakland, CA]
Where the guestroom walls are up!

  Member, East Bay Cohousing [no site yet] <http://www.ebcoho.org/>
Excited about some potential sites... but the group's not ready to move 
on 'em yet. Doing outreach at the Solano Stroll this Sunday.

  Boardmember, The Cohousing Network <http://www.cohousing.org/>
Reminding TCN members to renew their membership!


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