• What's Scoop?
• Are There Rules?
• Q & A
• What Else?
• How Do I Subscribe?
• What's Coming Up?

What's Scoop?

Scoop is a mailing list for people who read and write.

Scoop is voluntary.

Scoop is meant to be a place for a group of people to share stuff, including their own creative work, and for those people to discuss whatever comes of that sharing, or whatever else comes to mind.

Scoop is also meant to bring together an extended group of people who won't, at the edges of the social web being invited along, know much about people at the opposite edges, but who might have interesting things to say to each other all the same. You might see some names in the headers of this mail you don't recognize, but you've got something in common with their owners all the same.

If you're interested, you can visit the following link:

http://lists.puddingbowl.org/listinfo.cgi/scoop-puddingbowl.org

Feed the form your e-mail address and a password, reply to the mail the server sends you, and you'll be subscribed. What arrives in your inbox will be up to you and other subscribers.

Are There Rules?

Not really. The list is unmoderated. If you've been invited, someone expects you're reasonable, and reasonableness is about what's expected. Other "rules" will manifest themselves as they're needed to make sure traffic over the list is manageable.

Here are some ideas that might provide a good way to think about your participation on scoop:

• People reading scoop probably know someone you know. Part of the point of scoop is building an online community that brings an extended social web together without recreating the over-scaled, "promiscuously public" Web communities that suffer from the side effects of alienated participants who owe each other nothing in the way of civility.
• If you have Web space of your own, try to use it to post your work and share a link with the list: people who read scoop at work will benefit from that choice.
• Invite others to participate after some consideration of the matter, and encourage them to introduce themselves, or write an introduction for them once they subscribe.
• Scoop isn't a "secret club," just a list that depends on word of mouth and deliberate invitations instead of advertising in whatever form that could take.

Q&A

Q: Who else is subscribed?
A: Subscribe! Then you can see the membership list, which is shown to members only.

Q: Can I invite someone else along?
A: Feel free... just mail the invitation to individuals (not other mailing lists), and please never post an invitation if it can be read by people you can't choose.

Q: Will the things I post to Scoop be public?
A: No. The archives will be limited to members only.

Q: Does this eventually lead to some sort of participation in Amway or a violent political party?
A: No. Amway distributors are not, at this point, among the invitees. Regarding the political party part, the invitee list is diverse: attempts at teleproselytizing might be entertaining for the rest of us.

What Else?

If you're hoping to get more than vague information about what you can expect from a subscription to scoop, this might prove disappointing, because I'm not sure what we'll all get from it yet. Scoop's an experiment.

Here are some things I hope to accomplish:

• Tie together some disparate social webs: I'm lucky to know some interesting, good people, and through them I've met other interesting, good people. Each of these sets of relationships is a social web. Some webs overlap, some don't at all. I'd like scoop to bring some of them in contact
• Give creative people a network over which they can share their work: Several people in the social webs I interact with are interested in creating through writing, photography, music, programming, or design. Scoop is meant to allow them to share their creative work with an extended network of fellow creative people.
• Create a diverse discussion area: The sole criteria for picking the initial invite list was whether or not it seemed to me that the people I was inviting were good people. I think they'll bear out my thesis that good people think all sorts of things, and that the collection of people in the world we can place in the group "good" have, collectively, some wildly contradictory ideas. My other thesis that relates to this is that good people, by my definition, can figure out how to talk to each other about their wildly contradictory ideas without misery or strife.

How Do I Subscribe?

To subscribe, visit this link:

http://lists.puddingbowl.org/listinfo.cgi/scoop-puddingbowl.org

Look under the section entitled 'Subscribing to scoop' and read the instructions. Once you've subscribed, consider sending a mail introducing yourself to the list. With scoop, you can temporarily turn off mail from the list, request to be concealed from the membership list, and tweak the way scoop sends you mail.