Restricting Grex services

Dec 13 20:08 UTC 1996

Well, I've been thinking about Jan's scheme to split off the email system,
and related issues.  And I'm an Official Candidate for the board, so I
should offer a platform.  So I'm going to propose almost the complete
opposite of what everyone seems to be agreeing on.  This is a "something
to think about" item.

I'm wondering if this is another case where we are discussing technical
solutions to what is really an economic problem.  It looks to me that if
we offer email service, we are going to have to ration it in some way.  We
can either ration it by letting it become slow and unreliable.  Or, by
charging for it.  Some very wise person compared this to charging a toll
on a bridge.  If the bridge is free, more and more people will keep using
it until the inconvenience of the traffic jam just equals the value of
using the bridge.  If you charge a toll, you get fewer cars, but those
who do use the bridge can get where they are going.

If there is any subsidizing, I'd rather have email subsidize conferencing,
than vice-versa.

How would this affect membership and donations?  I'm not sure.  I guess, and
hope, that the demographics of Grex is changing.  It has largely been run and
supported by computer hobbyists.  Most of those people have other internet
access.  They wouldn't pay to get the service Grex provides, but they donate,
because they are deeply involved in the community of Grex.  But there are a
lot more people out there who aren't particularly interested in computers,
but need email and internet access as a tool of modern life.  They may either
pay to get it from AOL, or get it from Grex.  If they can get reasonably
decent service from Grex, I think they would be willing to pay a membership
fee for the priviledge.  But I don't think they will want to pay both AOL and
Grex.  If we can't offer a good enough internet access to charge for, then
I don't see why we bother with it at all.

Conferencing, on the other hand, should really be free.  It's a community
activity.  You don't pay a membership fee to hang around a barbershop, or to
post messages on a school bulletin board.

At any rate, I am in complete agreement with Jan's purpose, and apparently
everyone else, that we should find some way to preserve and focus on
conferencing, because that is what makes us Grex.

response 2 of 93:

Dec 13 22:26 UTC 1996

I should say that if the treasurer does not want to handle the molecular mail
requests for e-mail access that I have just proposed, I volunteer to do it
myself.

response 4 of 93:

Dec 14 03:03 UTC 1996

Ashamed though I am to admit it, I have to agree with kerouac
on this one.  I don't doubt that the number of users who would
send us snail-mail would be less than 100% of our Internet users.
(I especially suspect that users from India may find it difficult
to get letters to us.)  But I think we'd still be overloaded with
many hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of mail.  And I know
I don't want to have to deal with that.  And I don't expect
anyone else to, either.

response 6 of 93:

Dec 14 06:31 UTC 1996

re #4:  What is it that makes you ashamed?  Perhaps this incarnation of
        coop needs a "cheap shots at kerouac" item?

response 8 of 93:

Dec 14 13:58 UTC 1996

(Mary applaudes Steve Gibbard for that response.)

response 10 of 93:

Dec 15 03:25 UTC 1996

Steve, that is a powerful argument.  Grex is clearly a labor of love, and
will only work if staff and volunteers work on it because they want to,
because they *believe* in it.  Changing into a profit-motivated service
provider certainly sounds bad.  But what is the real purpose of Grex, and
what pursuit is really satisfying for staff to devote time and energy to?
Providing free email service to people you don't know, who don't participate
in the conferences, aren't in any way part of a community?

Maybe there is some rationing mechanism other than charging membership dues.
Requiring some registration is a possibility.  Or perhaps having some waiting
period?  I think in practice it might not be difficult to administrate
something.  It could well be some kind of honor system.  Museums often say
something like $4.00 suggested donation, and most people pay that, even
without someone physically collecting.

I can envision a message to new users that runs something as follows--
Welcome to Grex; we provide free access to all kinds of really interesting
conferences.  If you wish to use our email and internet facilities, we
request that you become a member.  Please proceed with the newuser program.
Check the box if you wish to use email. etc etc.

response 12 of 93:

Dec 15 06:20 UTC 1996

I can't make economic arguments for continuing to run Grex as it is. 
Everything I know about economic theory says that Grex should have been dead
from the start.  Yet, even if we are a bit underfunded, the way we are funded
more or less works, but we might well have a lot more money if we were
charging for things, especially if we could charge money and maintain a
volunteer staff.  But, while I can't support my views with economic arguments,
there are lots of philosophical arguments.

I suppose it's time to talk about personal history, and what Grex, run the
way it has always been run, did for me.  I was a sophomore in high school,
somewhat in awe of computers, and not really knowing much about them.  I knew
a few people who had e-mail addresses, and wanted to be able to communicate
with them.  Somebody told me about this system called Grex, which was free,
had five dial-up lines, and could send mail to the Internet.  Yes, it was on
an old slow Sun 2, and had a UUCP connection for mail, which took several
hours at best to get mail to the outside world.  Still, it worked, and was
free, and I got on and started playing around with it.  Eventually I learned
my way around the Unix shell enough to be able to do a few things, and also
slowly discovered how this strange Agora thing worked.  A few years went by,
and by reading the conferences and playing with things in the Unix shell, I
slowly began to learn a lot more about how things worked.  Eventualy the
Internet connection came along, and I had more toys to play with, and more
stuff to learn.  I think somewhere along the line I realized Grex was
something worth supporting, and started sending in little bits of spare cash,
maybe being a member every other month or something, but that's not really
relevant to this.  I started getting somewhat more involved, asking lots of
questions, trying even more things.  After a while I got access to faster
computers and faster connections to play with, but still kept coming back to
Grex as my main source of information about what to do with the good
connectivity.  After two and a half years of this, I was on Grex's board, and
had a full time job doing computer stuff that I had mostly learned how to do
on Grex.  Soon I was on Grex's staff too.  I stuck around Grex learning a lot
more, and Monday I'll be starting a job doing system administration for a
fairly big ISP.

Yeah, I know that was long, and rambling, and I really should deal with this
item when I'm wider awake, but it's that perspective that I have to look at
proposals like this with.  Grex needs money to operate, but if we lose sight
of what Grex is good for, then continuing to operate doesn't gain us much.
Instead, I tend to look at thise things in terms of what it will let Grex do
for people like me, so that other people can get as much out of Grex as I
have.  If Grex had been imposing a lot of bureaucracy or charging for things
when I first started out, I probably wouldn't have bothered.

response 14 of 93:

Dec 15 09:16 UTC 1996

  I guess I feel the same way scg does. I don't want to see anything change
that would restrict access. I'm not big on words, but I will do everything
I can to see that Grex stays the same, or gets better.

response 16 of 93:

Dec 15 17:15 UTC 1996

I'm having trouble understanding how people who just use Grex for
free mail are in any way part of our "community."  A community
to me means a group of people who exchange communications among
themselves, or at least *partly* among themselves.

response 18 of 93:

Dec 15 18:26 UTC 1996

I wouldnt want to totally restrict email for the reasons that
have been made clear.  If grex is a community, people should be able
to communicate within grex with each other.  But as I've said before,
offsite email could be a member perk.  There are plenty of places,
unlike five or eight years ago, to get free email.  Places like
Hotmail which are corporately sponsored and can afford to offer the
services for free.  Since most people telnetting in from elsewhere
have email already from their port of origin, and since most members
are from the A2 area locally (and it would be those local users who would
have the most interest in an email address here), there is no reason
it couldnt be another incentive for membership.

Any user of grex should have email for the purpoes of emailing other
users of grex and perhaps other non-commercial offsites.  But if a
user wants to send offsite email to a commercial site like AOL, make
that a member perk.  AOL and other commercial groups will probably
end up charging servers like grex to deliver their email eventually anyway,
or would if they could.  Ithink this is a way to incrase membership
and raise funds.

Another possibility would be to make multiple dialins a member perk.  If
a non-member was restricted to, say, two dialin sessiosn per 24 hours,
and a member could dialin repeatedly, that would be a good perk.

response 20 of 93:

Dec 15 20:44 UTC 1996

Like Mary, I am anti-perq (not to be confused with pro-drip). I prefer to
deal with system overload by restrictions on appropriate aspects of services
(time and space, in various forms) that apply equally to everyone. The
fact is, though, that such mild restrictions would lower the use of the
system by those that don't get - what shall I call it? - personal fulfillment?
- from Grex. Therefore the restrictions would have to be less restrictive
than one might at first think.

response 22 of 93:

Dec 15 23:44 UTC 1996

gift-based economics is an intriguing way to contemplate grex, hmmmm.
  
i rather like the description until the gift horse is toothless.

response 24 of 93:

Dec 16 01:53 UTC 1996

It does introduce the question of how to define a "conferencer". Clearly
someone who read and responds almost daily is a conferencer.  How about
someone who reads several conferences faithfully, but doesn't have all that
much to say and maybe posts every few months.  Is that person a conferencer?
How about someone who visits Agora once or twicew a year, but is very
opinionated and has a lot to say on those occasions?  What about someone who
reads a few conferences casually, but never posts anything?  Does that person
count?  I've heard the estimate that only about 20% of the folks who read the
conferences regularly  ever post a response -- are we to tell them that
however delightful they may find our company or however useful they may find
the conferences they read, they really aren't "one of us"?

I think we could end up with a whole lot higher noise to sound ration if we
gave people incentive to post something (anything!) at least every n period
or risk losing their mail privileges.

All in all, I think Jan's proposal is the best I've heard for dealing with
our conundrum fairly and effectively.  Steve's story comes very close to my
fantasy of what I (and I think, a lot of the founders) once dreamed GREX could
mean in peoples lives.