Thank you John, Dennis, Mark, Jim, Dennis, Erik, Tom, Michael, Karen, and Hari.
I think the best sign of the slow revival of this list is the growth of the moderators' group itself. Louis worried about who to pass the torch to, but Les was the only one of his candidates who picked up the ball. Since then others came on board. Besides myself, Mark Baugher, David Walters, Mark Lause, Michael Meeropol, and Hari Kumar. Les recruited most of the moderators. For a brief moment, Marv Gandall joined us. Besides our group's self creation and the list's survival, there are two other modest accomplishments. We have improved the tone of the discussion, but as Tom and Karen pointed out, it can still be off-putting. This is not a new problem. Louis P. himself could be one of the worst offenders and those old habits of rock em sock em debate have persisted while the world changed. I doubt that we will ever completely overcome this, but now we have a group of moderators who are paying attention and working to keep offenders on a tight leash. We don't normally toss people off the list, but the one's who we moderate (i.e.. put their posts in a que for approval before approving them for publication) sometimes leave the list. We have also successfully started and continued the online forum series. Although the forums have been of uneven quality, most of them are as good or better than similar events held by Haymarket or Why Marx. And we are getting better at what we are doing. This effort takes a lot of work, and we could still use more help. We are about to announce the next forum which will be about Syria on January 25th. And we are about to announce a series of other forums to be held later this year. The forums have several goals: to educate and inform, to encourage discussion at the forums and on the list, to enliven list members and encourage members who do not usually post to participate in discussion, and to attract new people to the list. So far, the connection between the forums and the members of the list has been their weakest point. We have mostly attracted audiences of people who are not list members, but a small number of those people have become list members. If you look at the names of the Marxmail members, you can get some idea of the gender demographics of the list. I would say that women probably make up 10 to 20 percent of the membership, but far less than 10% of the posts are from women. In fact, Karen's contribution to this thread is the only post by a woman that I could find in the last ten days. Its much harder to guess at other list demographic issues but clearly list members are mostly older, white, male, radicals in the United States. I would be great if a woman would join the moderators' group. We have tried to recruit women to the group without success. I think the main problem is the overall demographic structure of the list. To change that, we have to attract more people, younger people, and more diverse people. It would help is we could publish the list in languages besides English, but at present we are far from having the resources to do that. For now, our only tool for attracting new people is the series of forums. Again, thank you all for your comments. Anthony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34251): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34251 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110264786/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
