The rest of us, I'm sad to say, have trouble making small talk over dinner before the meetings. That's to be expected from us nerds , of course - social smoothness was never our long suit. Suddenly my screen lights up with prose both elegant and impassioned. I've never heard a peep from in person. Yet, when you see reprints from WELL discussions in, say, Harper's magazine, those are carefully chosen excerpts.
People get tired of filtering, good people leave, newsgroups run downhill.
At the other end of the spectrum are good mass-media publications, in which an editor does the filtering for you, putting ignorant harangues in file 13. Then they pay big bucks to Howard Rheingold and James Fallows to be witty and thoughtful. So I hope that this publication can really enhance the value of belonging to the CUUG community and participating in it. It can be an auditorium for us all to benefit from everybody's news about the computer industry, and about Calgary. Perhaps we can find common positions on social issues for the nation that so recently were only coffee-talk in research labs, and fight for our views to be heard.