hogwash!: [theforum] Donation Wall - last chance to comment

[Ron Dorman]

Hello Everyone,

i'm not trimming anything because i don't want to lose and context.

Elfur Logadóttir wrote:

>.| From: Russell Griechen
>.| >
>.| The webmonkey experience was typical of the turf wars.
>.| But looking at it from a historical and 'lessons learned' 
>.| point of view...Dan was the innovator...try this...try that. 
>
>again Russell, your facts are all wrong, far too wrong to even bother to
>correct you, but i'm still going to.
>
>the revolt that became evolt.org came about after a group of people
>repeatedly asked for open archives of the webmonkey mailing list. after
>waiting for probably 6 months and getting no response from the webmonkey
>team, dan decided to post his own collection of webmonkey emails as a
>temporary webmonkey archive, until the real thing would be launched.
>this was his way of giving back to a community that had helped him on
>numerous occasions.
>
>the legal eagles over at lycos, that had recently acquired wired at the
>time, decided that they didn't like the fact of open archive, especially
>not one that they couldn't control and possibly sell advertisements on,
>and therefore requested that dan would take the archive down.
>
IIRC, part the problem was that Lycos claimed ownership of all the 
emails (information), stating that the emails no longer belonged to the 
authors, but to Lycos and they alone determined what would be done with 
the emails.

>it was just as much the way they asked as the request itself that
>ignited the community disapproval which lead to 35 people getting
>together off[wm]list developing what would become evolt.org. so you see,
>the fact that lycos had possibly intended to have public archives with
>ad space, was a big pet peeve of ours and became one of evolt.org's
>criteria ... in a 'for the people, by the people' way, with no
>commercialism at all - to prove to the world, that a big web community
>could be run without selling every corner to the highest bidder. (i'm
>not claiming that wired did, but we wanted to make sure that our new
>community never would).
>
>there was not one founder - there were about 25-30 - there was not one
>leader - there were about 25-30 - most of whom were equal contributors
>of different aspects of the development, some visible, others behind the
>curtains.
>
this is true. i would add that without dan taking a desire for free 
information and inviting interested people to help form a site and 
community to provide it, those of us in that original group may have 
never joined together to create what became evolt.org.

>after launch of the evolt.org project those 25-30 people worked really
>hard to keep it together, as it grew bigger and at the same time because
>of the great understanding and appreciation of dan's employers the load
>on him got bigger than many others, this we tried to change, but
>probably came about it in a completely wrong way, which gradually lead
>to dan's departure.
>
>so here's me mourning dan's departure, but still claming that your facta
>is wrong russell, non-commercial model was one of the cornerstones of
>evolt.org's creation and is what seb was referring to. oh, and by the
>way, seb is included in the list of 25-30 i mention above, not that he
>needs defending at all, his work speaks for itself.
>
again, IIRC, it was more about free information, about commercial 
entities not controlling the information, that was the original 
conerstone. to me, that doesn't mean evolt.org was against commercial 
endeavors, just that we would not let commercialism control the 
information.  also seems to me that we have almost let commercialism 
control the information - because it requires money to keep the 
information free.

>cheers
>elfur
>an active member of evolt.org from day one whose name you probably don't
>recognise either.
>
i haven't been very active since our move, i apologize for that. i do 
still read all the emails on the lists every day. i still care very much 
for evolt.org and it's well being. i will not be able to be very active 
for a while yet, but i will continue to read everything and care.

i believe russell has made some good points that should be considered, 
as have many others. i believe that we humans never have the facts 
correct, we are humans! our perspectives prevent our facts from being 
everyones facts.

i hope we can all focus on the big goal of keeping good information free 
and do what we have to (ethically and leagally) to make it happen.

Ron D.