Discuss mailing list

[Martin C <martin AT mchomenet.com>]

Better late than never...

> I.R.C. is great, it serves many important purposes and is a great
> 'hangout' if you like that kind of thing and a great place to get help.
I have only ever been in the OpenNIC channel twice. I don't use IRC for the 
same reason I don't use instant messaging; I feel obliged to constantly watch 
it and 
respond to things rather than just get on with other stuff.

> time to sit and read the stream of chat coming through or go back every
> day and read the logs just in case something interesting or important is
> being talked about.
Same.

> Mailing lists are the places to 'announce' things of interest to the
> group that they should know, in my opinion.
Of the two, mailing lists and IRC, mailing lists is my favoured medium for 
discussion and announcements. The only thing better is a forum.

> Hopefully now OpenNIC has a good search engine (seek.geek) things might
> change, but there still needs to be the content to bring people in,
> which is sorely lacking and do you really think others can, will or even
> should start it all off?
It also needs a way to assist everyday users to transition to it's 
facilities. If we managed to convince a major ISP on every continent/country 
that our members 
belong to to run a T2 server, I think we could make an impact on 
accessibility.

But to get there we need incentive for the network engineers (I've written 
plenty of articles on this, all in the public domain, for people here to 
use/tweak/edit/re-word how they like) and "killer app" content and features. 
Is anyone here working on the content part? Something that is so interesting 
and 
fascinating that it would make other people be more motivated to use our 
network just so they can experience it?

I think what Peter was slowly hinting at is that OpenNIC, from the outside, 
may start to look more and more like an irrelevant project aiming for 
pointless self 
gratification unless a real inspiring endeavour that provides a "killer app" 
solution with an incentive is produced.

I think we need to get our information better organised as well. I've just 
been informed off-list that part of the Wiki is out of date on a very 
important piece of 
DNS server setup. That shouldn't be.

Also, I was going to implement djbdns and MySQL support into Regnum, but in 
the end I couldn't tell what good it was going to do, or how it would further 
OpenNIC as 
a public facility, so I postponed that. I also wrote a WHOIS data format 
proposal on the wiki and the server software it would run on (current 
2-clause BSD, but can 
release as public domain if anyone here prefers), noone seems interested.

I'm just saying I can appreciate how frustrated Peter felt how OpenNIC 
_almost_ feels like it's just hanging in limbo. Yes, the DDoS attacks aren't 
helping and 
ICANN are being silly (again!), but we also need to work on figuring out what 
people would like to see from the project.

my two cents.

-- 
Martin C.
Email/XMPP: martin AT mchomenet.com
Web: www.martincoleman.com