[gopher] History and future of "the gopher project"

[kaltheat at googlemail.com]

Hi,

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 09:27:23AM +0100, Mateusz Viste wrote:
> You are suggesting a central authority for gopher, while the very nature 
> of gopher is to be a totally decentralized mesh of different servers 
> interconnected with each other. And that's one (if not the main) reason 
> why gopher survived to this day. There's no central hq for gopher, just 
> like there's no such hq for the entire web.

It's not that a more centralized planning ("authority" reminds me of 
dictatorship and that's certainly not what I was thinking of!) would change the 
decentralized mesh at all. If I understood correctly there were the inventors 
of gopher in the past who played a "gopher project" role - you can say a 
"central authority" ... And if there was significant development or if there 
were significant changes to gopher or gopherspace, you could get informed by 
receiving "official" informations (via usenet, gopherhole, ...) from the 
"headquarter" (for example (correct me if I'm wrong) they organized GopherCons 
as well). And you see eventhough there was something that could have been 
called a "headquarter", it never impaired the decentralized mesh of servers. If 
you speak of reliability of one central place/server the future gopher project 
I have in mind maintains, then of course there could and should be mirrors 
(like it is in "normal" web, too). And if you thought that the future gopher 
project I'm speaking of might "overtake" personal projects (like GopherMole ;) 
): That's not what I was thinking of! The central gopher project page could 
just point/link to projects that quite a few gopherians consider 
usefull/interresting/geeky/...

So maybe my idea of the role a future "gopher project" could play (or could be 
organized) gets more clear when I say that I had big open source projects in 
mind when thinking of the gopher project (not a dictator Linus-Linux-project, 
but more a FreeBSD way where (as far as I know) people periodically change 
roles, get elected, have mentors, ...).

And again: These are just ideas and they don't directly lead to action.

Nonetheless if I had spare time I would be glad to help out in creating newbie 
guides/instructions.
But firstly I don't want to do work that was already done, secondly I don't 
want to place it somewhere where newbies reach it by accident and thirdly I 
don't want these documents to expire/go stale (just because I have no spare 
time anymore or I'm not aware of recent development or I don't get a hint that 
something might be corrected or is outdated). That is where planning/organizing 
(not dictatorship ;) ) comes in handy.

Regards,
kaltheat