Cohousing-L Mailing List: Lists & Organizations

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

The subject of lists and organizational affiliations is a bigger one  
than most people realize. I love email lists. Whenever I want to know  
about a new subject, I search YahooGroups for lists on that topic,  
joining in one instance 35 lists. Some have little traffic. Others are  
really covers for lurking commercial interests. But a good number,  
like this one, are gold mines of experts, professionals, fans,  
advocates, etc. , that provide instant access to living, breathing  
people, resources, and community.

I love the spontaneity and relatively uncensored messages, the variety  
of discussions that ebb and flow to the list's own rhythms. Message  
boards that people advocate because they "organize" messages, I find  
boring and filled with eternally preserved irrelevance.

I've belonged to many lists that were taken over by subject-related  
organizations. Usually a moderator hands over the list because they  
are tired and trust the organization to continue the list as it has  
always been. I have never seen this happen.

Organizations feel competitive with lists that they do not control.  
Lists that do in many ways what they are not doing and that allow  
people access to information without paying dues to the organization.  
They will choose a moderator that is more concerned with protecting  
the good name of the organization than the interests, often irreverent  
and chaotic, of the list members.

But when organizations take over lists, the function changes.   
Inevitably, in my experience, the organization begins to fear the  
freedom of the list. "Liability" is a big excuse for limiting topics  
and/or moderating all messages. The ego of the organization expands to  
control the list. The list comes to serve the interests of the  
organization, not the subscribers.

Lists where all messages are moderated die quick deaths. To have 5 or  
10 messages come through at the same time, when the moderator is  
online, is deadly. The messages are cold, no longer relevant. And who  
wants to read 10 messages from one list one after another. The  
questions are no longer current and the comments are drowned by those  
of the messages around them. Organizations  serve different interests  
than spontaneous discussions and Q & A.

If cohousing "us" wants to advertise here about their website, I think  
that's fine. But in the past, some members of the organization have  
given the impression that they are the experts and doing the "real"  
work and everyone should rise to their cause. They criticize the list  
members for not doing the work they think needs to be done

Thanks to Fred, the list serves the interests of cohousers, old and  
new, and has been doing so for more than 10 years. And for many of  
those years, the website and the organization were doing nothing. This  
is not the place to be criticizing people or telling them to do it  
your way.

There are many people on the list looking for places to go to find  
cohousing. They like the timely trustworthiness of these postings  
compared to a website that is far out of date and undependable. And  
don't criticize the people here for not updating it. Websites rarely  
work for this purpose -- lists do.

(I just wish people would realize that it's a big world out there and  
no one knows which state or city their neighborhood is in when they  
refer to "Main Street Cohousing.")

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines in Washington DC
Where all roads lead to Casablanca