Jeff wrote:82_28, not for the first time do I point your attention toward the following
RI Guidestone:
"Please refrain from directing obscenities towards other board members in the body of the post." It's not a suggestion.
I have no objection to a thread like this, but the conversation really must stay meta, or else it's going to be breaking the rules itself.
And brainpanhandler, what have you done to make people so mad at you?
I remember a thread in the Lounge about volcanoes that got nastier faster than anything I've ever seen at RI. Cuda locked it stat, with an immortal, inspired comment - that I put in the RI Quotes thread.
However, I remember thinking - something happened there that is really not good for RI - a sort of containment vessel getting breached.
Going back to the original post, I could post different structures and sequences, based on certain peoples behaviour here, that I have tracked over quite a long time and could provide thread by thread evidence.
However, I asked myself, so what? Would it actually repay the time and energy invested?
No it wouldn't.
It doesn't matter if there are things like this happening - R.I. is existing in a very low state of functioning and that isn't going to change any time soon. There is no blogging, contributions from members are not built upon, the amazing diverse talents of people here are not developed / cross-pollinated - remember that MANY people here are significant contributors / experts / activists in the own right. All of us have probably had personal aspirations for this place but if past behaviour can give a good indication of future performance, it isnt going to happen.
Some positive reflections...
During the Egyptian mega-events, the Vanlose Kid & AliceTheKurious duo was one of the very best things I have seen come out of this place. The combination of inside / outside observation was incredibly compelling.
I loved JR and bks hyper-kinetic podcast
A couple of months ago, I did an Excel based comparative analysis of front pages stories, views and replies - regarding an intuition that RI had changed over the last couple of years from being quite diverse in its subject matter wrt 'Fortean' subjects to being much more focused on gender issues, current news and events.
and broadly speaking, that seems to be the case.
So (and I guess this is directed at Jeff) two useful questions would seem to surface here...
A Purpose Question
What is the purpose of RI? - what does it DO? - why have it?
(no Motherhood and ApplePie statements , plz
)
and
A Vision Question
What specifically do you want to see happen with it in the future?
What would real success for RI look / sound / feel like to you?
My greatest concern about RI is that events really ARE moving faster and faster in the 'real world' and RI will have to adapt or die, a prospect about which I am currently 'cautiously pessimistic'.
