[theforum] sorry for the change in subject line but gmail hates me and I just want to get this sent

[David Kaufman]

Hi Erika,

Erika Meyer wrote:
> David Kaufman<david at gigawatt.com> wrote:
>> I personally cannot fathom shutting the thing down.  I just can't.
>>
> last time I tried to log into #evolt it was down... do we still have
> IRC?  can we do an IRC (or similar) meeting sometime?  (wish we could
> meet in person.)

I don't know about the IRC channel -- I never use IRC any more (chat 
addict in recovery) -- but you can IM me just about any time! 
(david.kaufman at gmail.com (on Google Talk) or gigawattt (on AIM)).

As far as calling it a day (if by that Elfur did in fact mean evolt.org 
as a whole) as I've said in the past, to me at least, evolt is first and 
foremost a mailing list.  It's nice that we have a popular website too 
(seein' as how we're a community of web developers and all) but as long 
as the list is useful I feel a personal responsibility to keep it going.

Online communities are all illusions, and are elusive.  The fact that 
we, the stewards of this particular one, come and go, or suffer long and 
chronic bouts of apathy, is no reason to "give up".  The community 
exists and has value as long as anyone is posting web dev problems to 
the List, asking questions or starting a discussion, and someone else is 
replying.  That's the litmus test.  And the fact that the articles on 
weo and the list archives on leo got half a million page views last 
month tells me that what we do here, no matter how apathetically we do 
it, benefits the googling public as well!

So while it may not be the same community that the old timers remember, 
or want it to be still, that's just the nature of online communities: 
they evolve, they body of participants turns over (and over).  New 
generations of web heads come along to replace the old ones -- in short, 
they evolt :-)  The community does what it wants, not what we want it 
to, and every time another evolter gets grumpy and suggests maybe we 
should "call it a day", I want to just tell them, "You may."

But I'm not ready to give up on evolt.  If the site didn't get a new 
article submitted or list post for a year, and financially I had to move 
it to a $10 a month shared hosting account somewhere just to keep the 
content available for archival purposes, I would.

-dave, (playing Dewey, the last drone, floating away on the last dome)