Meet the Founders
by Misti Anslin
An Interview with Valerie Mates

GREX:   How did you first get involved with GREX?

VM:     I'm one of Grex's founders.  When Grex was founded, M-Net was owned
and run by a single person.  That person tended to make split-second decisions
about M-Net's future.  The users wanted more input into these decisions.  We
Grex founders shared a vision of a system run by its users, where the users
would make *all* of the decisions about how the system is run.  We knew the
discussions would often be long and heated, and we knew decisions would be
reached very slowly.  But with many people working together to make the
decisions, the decisions would be good ones.

GREX:   What is your philosophy about conferencing systems like GREX? (What
are they for, how should they be run, that sort of thing).

VM:     I view Grex as a place for people to make connections with other
people.  I've talked to a number of people who said that the sense of
community on Grex helped them out of long-term depression.  I also see Grex
as a place for young people to get their first exposure to computing.  Grex
is also a good place for  programmers to practice their programming skills,
and writers their writing skills.

        Community systems such as Grex have some unique advantages over big
systems like AOL.  People  anywhere can talk about universal topics such as
cooking or sports.  But there aren't many places where you can find the local
discussions that are present on Grex.  I view the Consumer conference as a
special strength of Grex's.  There are discussions to compare local doctors,
dentists, and landlords.  You can't get that kind of information from local
commercial services, such as lists of area doctors, and national services are
too big to care about one city in Michigan.

GREX:   How long have you been "modeming"?  What do you like best about it?

VM:     I've been modeming since November, 1986.  Jeff Kaplan (login ID
"kaplan" on Grex) gave me his Procomm dialing directory, which included the
number for M-Net.  I was mostly interested in very small bulletin boards for
the first few years.  When I graduated from the U, my access to e-mail was
going to end.  I started logging in to Kitenet regularly, for e-mail. 
Kitenet's owner soon bought M-Net and merged the two systems.  I used M-Net
regularly after that, until we founded Grex.

        The original Grex t-shirts capture what I like best about modeming:
you can "see the world without leaving your chair".  From the comfort of my
own home, for free, I can yak with old friends in California, find people on
Grex to chat with day or night, or join a philosophical discussion about the
future of the automobile, or a practical one about parenting small children.

GREX:   What's you current favorite conference and why?

VM:     There are lots of conferences I like, so it's hard to choose just one.
I like the Ann Arbor/Ypsi conference and the Consumer conference because I
see them as one of Grex's unique strengths.  The cooking, plants, SF, women's
issues, kids, and programming conferences appeal to me because those are
special interests of mine.  The info conference, big tangled mess that it is,
is neat because of the amount of help it can provide to people. The co-op
conference is interesting because it is where Grex is run. I enjoy Grex's
gigantic general conference, Agora, and somehow manage to follow almost all
the discussions there.

GREX:   What would you like to see happen on GREX in the next five years?  What
direction should GREX be taking?

VM:     The small-system sense of community on Grex is very important to me.
I would like to see Grex add enough hardware and software to provide good
service to everybody who wants to use the system, while remaining a friendly,
thriving, community. 

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