[Peace-discuss] Use of Peace vs Peace-Discuss e-mail lists

[Stuart Levy]

Carl,

Here is the announcement that went to each person who joined the
peace-discuss list as of 2006.   It hasn't changed since then:

    Welcome to the Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net mailing list! This is
    an unmoderated mailing list for general discussion of anti-war,
    anti-racism and other AWARE issues. There is a separate mailing list
    (peace) for announcements, calls to action and AWARE meeting minutes.
    PLEASE DO NOT CROSSPOST messages to both lists.

{followed by details of how to write to the list, find the list
archives, remove yourself, reach the list moderators etc.}

And here is the announcement that goes to people joining Peace:

    'peace' is an AWARE mailing list for announcements and calls to
    action relating to anti-war, anti-racism and other AWARE issues.
    AWARE meeting minutes are also posted to this list. Posts from
    non-list-members are moderated to cut down on SPAM. There is a
    separate 'peace-discuss' mailing list for general discussion.

I think this is pretty much what I've been saying it was.   And you know
this perfectly well - it has come up a number of times over the years.

The above are also the policies that I've been describing when we invite
people, typically at the Farmer's Market, to join the lists.    Peace is
intended to be low-traffic, aimed at announcements.   Peace-discuss is
an often-interesting place for discussions, articles, and arguments,
sometimes including flame wars.   Sometimes interested people will sign
up for Peace only, others for both lists.

As to the question of whether policies like these are a good idea:

> In any case, it’s difficult to see how restricting information and discussion helps the antiwar movement.

I think there is a pretty plain reason for maintaining this sort of
separation.   People come to us (or to a newspaper, or to a facebook
group, or to a church) with some expectation about how their time will
be used.   When they signed up, we gave them some indication of that.

When people become members of Sierra Club, for example, they're invited
to supply their e-mail addresses.   In return, Sierra Club promises that
their local group won't just send them a bundle of messages every day.  
They're promised that they'll get at most two messages per month, unless
they explicitly sign up for mailing lists which receive more traffic
than that (which many do, but many more don't).

If SC didn't make such a promise, they'd quickly lose the patience of
most of their members.   Under those circumstances - given the choice of
receiving either lots of messages from anyone who had something to say,
or nothing - most people would insist that they receive *no* e-mail at
all.   So SC would lose any way of reaching them even for the highest
priority messages.  They don't want that.

The collection of Usenet news groups, a sort of distributed anarchic
communication system, worked all this out in the early 1980s for the
same reason.   Whether formally moderated or not, each group has a
policy document, adopted when it was created, that says what is within
the scope of that group.

I think that's the spirit in which the AWARE e-mail policies were
originally set up.



On 10/18/2017 08:59 AM, C G Estabrook wrote:
> "That understanding of the purposes of each list” is different from their original description. (See below.)
>
> In any case, it’s difficult to see how restricting information and discussion helps the antiwar movement.
>
> —CGE
>
>> On Oct 17, 2017, at 10:34 PM, stuartnlevy via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>>
>> Discussion remains open on peace-discuss.  Peace is not a list intended for discussions, including articles.  That understanding of the purposes of each list did not start with me.   
>>
>> If you are interested in establishing a new open antiwar e-mail list, you are welcome to create one, invite people to it, and run it however you wish.   An invitation to join such a list would be entirely appropriate for the Peace list.
>>
>>  -- Stuart
>>
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>> Date: 10/17/17 17:33 (GMT-06:00)
>> To: Peace <peace at anti-war.net>
>> Cc: Peace-discuss List <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Censorship at AWARE
>>
>> AWARE has two email lists <Peace> and <Peace-discuss>. When they were founded, they were described as follows:
>>
>> “<Peace> is an AWARE mailing list for announcements and calls to action 
>> relating to anti-war, anti-racism and other AWARE issues. AWARE meeting minutes are also 
>> posted to this list.” 
>>
>> “<Peace-discuss> is an unmoderated mailing list for general discussion.”
>>
>> The lists have different if overlapping lists of subscribers.
>>
>> Stuart Levy has taken it upon himself to censor my posts to <Peace> on the grounds that the list is only for event announcements. That’s not what the description says, and in any case, AWARE as an organization has never authorized anyone to enforce the different descriptions of the two lists.
>>
>> It’s difficult to see how censorship of AWARE email lists contributes to the local anti-war movement. 
>>
>> Stuart and I have disagreed about aspects of the antiwar movement in the past. Our most recent disagreement was about antifa - he’s for it; I’m against it. But it would seem far better to discuss these differences than to suppress comments to an AWARE email list. 
>>
>> --CGE
>> _______________________________________________
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>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
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