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<BASICALLY> NoEnd's goal is to humanize technology. Humanizing technology is about helping the people behind the screen be positively human, but it means different things to different people. In more concrete terms, NoEnd is about creating a community that exchanges ideas and information that help us all live better. It is about giving, and getting to know each other as people, vs. just getting. | |||||
| We all help weed the NoEnd garden and keep it thriving. Some people are more active and organize occasional meetings, keep the servers going, and admin the list. Others provide support by being an audience, a poet, a technical guru, or a private poster to individuals, etc. There is also a NoEnd board-like group made up of several long time NoEnders that communicate when things get rough on the list and big decisions need to be made. | |||||
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<LIST ADMIN> The list administrator is Eric Wolfram . He can bring you into NoEnd, and as Cosby said, he can take you out. | |||||
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<LIST PROTOCOL> 1) Posting to NoEnd is like being the featured speaker in an auditorium of hundreds of non-judgmental friends, potential clients, potential associates, and recruiters. You will become known by the words you write, and by the respect you show others.
2) Consider the people behind the computer and try and help them.
Give to get. Give beautiful writing to get technical help, or visa
versa. Give us a poem, or share an experience that could save others
time. Strive to become a rich person in the wealthy NoEnd gift
economy.
3) With the freedom of publishing words to others via email comes the
responsibility of crafting your words well, and being aware of the
differences between email, message boards, face to face and other
forms of communication.
4) Subscribing to NoEnd requires a sponsor and is subject to list
size and health. Directions for subscribing and unsubscribing can be
found on the list.
5) We discourage bickering, flaming, personal attacks in public,
biting sarcasm, provoking people, and prolonged contentious debates.
Disagreeing is fine, as long as it progress past disagreement in the
sprit of agreeing to disagree. We've found that heat without light
leads to frying people's attention bandwidth. If you tend to get that
way, help yourself out by finding another venue to satisfy these
urges--a venue where people like to read OPABE (other peoples
arguments by e-mail). Put another way, this is not a debate forum for
personal cathartic maintenance, but a place to exchange ideas and
information among friends to help us all. Repeat offenders should
expect ramifications.
6) Respond to as many posts PRIVATELY as possible. There are many
interesting people on this list. Get to know them via personal
e-mails. Sometimes the best thing to write to the list is nothing.
7) There are no rules about what's off topic, but please use ACCURATE
subject headers. This way others can skim mail and avoid subjects
they just don't give a hoot about, e.g.
8) Cite Your Sources
NoEnd is not a news source. However, current events of the changing world around us cannot be avoided. So to the extent that news is discussed it is imperitive that all participants maintain credibility lest the conversations degenerate into lies, damned lies and statistics. Dubious news sources are sometimes worth checking out but as with so many things in our midst, with healthy skepticism. Urban legends, humor and hoaxes, rumors and mythologies all play a role in our civilization. If they're brought up for discussion or news originating from unknown or questionable sources, they should be brought up as such and not as news. Not that NoEnd is an academic forum requiring rigorous fact checking but a basic effort to distinguish and highlight sources is expected. 9) We would like to keep the list to a manageable size. Please DO NOT post subscription information about NoEnd to other mailing lists, nor publish it on the Web or other media. In the event of a loss of signal over noise, NoEnd is occasionally "Hot Tubbed", or shut off and rebuilt from face to face meetings.
10) This document, as well as the history and information on NoEnd for
public consumption, can be found at http://www.noend.org
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<HISTORY FOOTNOTE> NoEnd was born in January of 1996 from the desire to humanize the Web through in-person meetings. The meetings consisted of going around to each person in a circle and having them share how their week was. These personal narratives were found to provide support and identity in the then new, and sometimes solitary, world of Web development. NoEnd was founded by Caleb John Clark and Paul Vachier and first took place in the North End Café (thus NoEnd) in San Francisco's North Beach. | |||||