To: cdp!christic@labrea.Stanford.EDU
In-reply-to: cdp!christic@labrea.Stanford.EDU's message of Mon, 4 Feb 91 22:41:50 PST <9102050641.AA00709@labrea.Stanford.EDU>
Subject:  misc.peace et al

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Andy,

Thanks for your note and support.

As far as helping with misc.peace, what I was hoping is that you could
"co-moderate" in the sense that you would post directly yourself to
misc.peace stuff from Christic. We would agree in advance of course of
general standardized format, rough frequency, etc. Can you do this?
This de-centralized notion --hopefully including other PeaceNet
groups, LADB, etc.-- seems to me to be the best way of having the
volume we'd like (and probably will anyway) have (A LOT!) while
avoiding having someone (Rich) of a few people have to sort it all out
and post it themselves.

This way the people who read and handle certain topics will be
spending a relatively minute amount of extra time formatting and
posting to misc.peace. Yigal Arens (on board of Jewish Committee On
the Middle East (JCOME)), for example, has already agreed to
co-moderate --in this sense of the word-- middle east topics. Sound
ok?

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Another thing I wanted to raise has to do with resource files...

I have one with Speak Out! and another speaker's bureau; do you have
an entry I could add for Christic speakers that are available?
Similarly I could add any Christic videos (I already have "COVERUP"
which I thought was excellent entered) to the "videos" resource file,
an entry for "Convergence" in the "pulications" resource file, and
anything else you can think of. I just found an old issue of
Convergence and one of Contragate Alert in John Lamperti's office
(which he lent me while he's in Nica/CostaR and while I try to sort
out my academic life) in the recycling bin and saw stuff about
speakers and vidoes etc resources...

Also, I'm going to try to slow down the growth of the 2.3 or so Meg
library of files I have and do a real and thorough job of indexing
everything that's there, so all the info will be avail. to PSNs at
their fingertips, arranged in subdirectories hierarchically [e.g. you
can now look up HR quotes on contra terrorism; documentation of the
fairness of '84 ('85?) Nica elections; Sandinista achievements, etc,
in respective files in the "nica" subdirectory] It's not a database,
but with this arrangement, plus the emacs editor --about which I
learned more recently, and whose mail-reading, keyboard-macros,
directory-editing and other truly amazing features only a CS genius
like Stallman could do have saved me substantial amounts of time in
electronic activism-- it works remarkably well, with almost any item
of the Megabytes in front of you in seconds, as emacs helps you locate
the subdirectory, file, and the searching within the file. If you guys
(Christic) have friends in academia as I'm sure you do, I would
consider this free (they don't care until we reach 100 Megs, probably)
storage and powerful organizational/retrieval system. Of course is
can't replace the customized stuff you already have and are used to,
but a good supplement, I think.

Got carried away; I raise the indexing issue to say that as a
longer-term project, or if you already have them, indexes of what you
have (I mean articles, e.g. one you posted written by Jack Anderson;
(plus the on-line Convergence et al regulars)) could be made avail to
the PSN (and other) network(s)

Concise, indexed information; just as I want PSNs and other activists
to be able to instantly access stats on infant mortality before/after
in Nica vs. El Salvador and quotes on HRs in these, so too they should
be able to almost instantly look up *concise* --not mountains of
into-- info on La Penca stuff you guys have. So they can find all the
key facts about the hist. of case and recent developments in 20
minutes at most, say; deeper research for an in-depth article would
require more time.

Thought I'd share those thoughts/goals with you...  Keep up the good
work, you "looney Christics" are in good company with MLK the
"communist," Chomksy the "extremist" etc...

Harel

P.S.: will try tomorrow-ish to send mass-email to all misc.peace
people (about 15 people wrote saying they are interested in some way),
incl you, so we have each other's names/emails, and proceed then to
Call for Votes - will contact Rich to see if we have green light there
first though.