Re: List Minders

Katharine,

I absolutely agree with you on this.

Some years ago there was a system whereby each of the list minders
had a day to mind the list. The system worked well for several years,
or so it seemed to me. I don't know how the other list minders did
their work but at first I would warn the person directly on the list.
However, that was disruptive so eventually I started to do it off
list. But that too had its problems because one person in particular
felt that I was censoring her and not other males on the list and she
accused me several times of sexist behavior, even though I was often
in fact sending an off-list rebuke to the males. So eventually I just
got fed up with the abuse, especially since it appeared to me that I
was the only one of the list minders doing any work at all. I could
be wrong but it seemed that way to me at the time. Even after that I
continued to be blamed by the person in question for not rebuking
those who she felt were insulting her. I felt that this was terribly
unfair because even when the system was operating fairly well at the
beginning I was only one of five or six list minders, each with a
specific day to mind the list, and I never felt it was my
responsibility, or right, to attempt to mind the list on a day other
than the one I had been assigned.

By and large I felt that Gordon gave me good support but ultimately I
came to see the role of list minder as a no-win job because I was
damned if I did and damned if I didn't.

So I don't know how to fix it, but in my opinion you are right in
that the system we have is completely broken.

Sandy

>I think it's clear that the listminder system is completely broken. I
>don't know what should be done about it, and I don't know if assigning
>other listminders would help. As long as listminders will not censure
>people for insulting other people, which was supposed to be their job,
>and as long as people won't self-censor themselves and refrain from
>insulting other people, the problem will continue and the list will not
>survive because knowledgeable people will no longer be willing to put
>themselves out there to be exposed to gratuitous personal insult.
>
>Katharine Thayer
Received on Sun Mar 13 11:57:10 2005