From: jabba@deathstar.Stanford.EDU (Richard Charles Graves)
Subject: Re: RFD: soc.culture.latin-america.soc.culture.latin-america
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 21:46:51 GMT


Looks like everyone called my bluff.  Guess something IS
going to happen.
Some things have changed since my original post, including,
in part, my mind.
Creating a s.c.la.s.c.la seems a bit ridiculous, as well as
confusing and against usenet guidelines.
I think the best thing for everyone would be to create a
talk.politics.latin-america, which would take much of the
new influx of posts and allow s.c.la to return to its
charter.  t.p.la would be for news, comment, and discussion
of political issues relevant to Latin America.  Unlike
s.c.la, t.p.la would have as one of its primary goals the
discussion of political economy and U.S. foreign policy in
the region.  I would expect that most ips posts would go in
the new group.

In the month or so before a new group can be created, I
would see the ips posts and discussion thereof continuing,
though at a lower level than the last two weeks; 5 or so
seems a reasonable guideline for maximum daily postage.
After a brief flame war initiated by me, Dave & Debra (hr
coord) have proven themselves to be quite reasonable people
and have agreed to cut down on their posts.   Until the new
group is active, we have to consider the interests of the
estimated 100+ people who like the igs posts and may have
subscribed to s.c.la in the erroneous belief that the IPS
posts represent the conference's purpose.
[Question: are there people out there who, because of disk
space and bandwidth considerations, can read soc. but not
talk. newsgroups? I don't want to cut people off.]

To keep igc on the air until it gets "its own group," I'd
advise hr coord to post prominently a "READ ME: ips/igc
info" article which would briefly describe igc.org (what it
is, what's its purpose, who writes the articles, who to
email for various things), acknowledge that s.c.la is not
the proper place to post lots of news/opinion articles, tell
people how to get more than the max of 5 articles per day
posted to s.c.la by ftp or listserver, and invite people to
join a mailing list.

To clarify what I see as the difference between the groups,
I went to the trouble of making a table:

soc.culture.latin-america      talk.politics.latin-america
------------------------------------------------------------
audience is primarily latin    primarily u.s. audience
americans and                  interested because they
hispanics/latinos interested   care about U.S. policy; also
in their country of origin,    europeans and latin
plus americans/europeans       americans interested in this
interested in this point of    point of view
view

articles about Latin American  <no equivalent>
society, culture, religion,
language, literature, etc,
written primarily by and
primarily for latin americans

social posts, some polemics    polemics

avoid third-person narratives  third-person narratives and
and news articles about latin  news articles about latin
america                        america

discussion of Latin American   discussion of U.S. and
policy towards the U.S. and    European policy towards
Europe                         Latin America

how latin americans see        how americans and europeans
themselves and the world       see latin america

spanish and english            english

<no equivalent>                general issues of U.S.
                               foreign policy or
                               theoretical issues which
                               may in some way affect
                               Latin America
------------------------------------------------------------
So what do people think? Anyone want to manage a CFV, ASAP?
Before this happens, we should compile a list of other
interested newsgroups and determine what to say to them
(it can all be positive since the inappropriate posting
flameage only happened here). I'd include:
alt.progressive
misc.activism.progressive
soc.culture.mexican

What else?

--
| rich graves, stanfd res affairs mac tech, and occasional senior, poli sci |
| jabba@deathstar.stanford.edu     88C Escondido Village     (415) 497-1573 |