The last few weeks have seen a few dust ups on the discussion mailing list hosted by the Redwood Technology Consortium. In case you were not aware, I am President of the Board of the RTC at the moment. That’s my disclaimer.
There seems to be two themes being discussed in sudden bursts of postings in a normally rather complacent list. Some people are questioning the focus of the organization, what programs it offers, where it directs its efforts. I think this is a valid topic. However, inevitably, once the discussion evolves in to asking people to make concrete suggestions, or to offer to volunteer some effort, the discussion quickly dissipate back in to lassitude. It’s easy to criticize, much harder to come up with creative solutions and harder still to commit to do some real work. But this has been the cycle of the organization for many years. It’s not really surprising.

The other thread that keeps popping up has to do with the list itself. Every time someone posts a message that provokes one or more responses, someone raises the odd idea that discussions shouldn’t be taking place on the list! Instead of ignoring or deleting the posts, or better yet, unsubscribing, they clutter the list with complaints about the clutter on the list. I’m not sure why this is.

I suppose some people would prefer these kinds of discussions be held in a forum. Maybe we’ll install a forum again. We had one on the old site. We left it out of the new site because the old forum was hardly ever used.  Another option would be to offer an announcement only list. But I’,m not sure I want to administer another list.

In either case, if you would like to participate in this discussion, you can join the list. In spite of the complaints, even with these more frequent posts, messages only number around 5 per day. Not very high volume. You don’t have to be a member of RTC and you could affect a number of tech related issues that affect the county and the entire region. You can even receive the list in digest form so you get the whole day’s group of messages in one easily dealt with email.
The other