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

[kaltheat at googlemail.com]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 11:41:22AM -0800, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> > > Although I respect (and in some ways wouldn't mind) a central planning
> > > process for Gopher, I think that makes what is for many of us a fun sideline
> > > unnecessarily bureaucratic.
> > 
> > This is a good point: bureaucracy shouldn't evolve!
> > But what could be bureaucratic? People could work/play on as they used to do.
> 
> In that case, what would such a central approach solve? Perhaps I don't
> understand clearly what you're proposing. It sounded like a W3C-like
> consortium, and I think the W3C's drawbacks have become rather apparent.
> 
> Based on this,
> 
> > What could be constraining and for whom?
> > For example: If there was a guide on how to setup Bucktooth which(the guide)
> > has been developed and was maintained by "the gopher project" anyone could
> > write h[is|er] own guide or propose changes or whatever. In which way could
> > this be constaining?
> 
> It seems more like you're actually proposing a central resource or repository
> for this data, which doesn't really need anyone's permission ...

Right. But of course such a repository can't be public writeable to avoid
destruction/spam/.... So some agreement is needed to clarify who can write to
the repository and if the repository should be the product of a project some
agreement is needed if certain content is reasonable/tolerable/without mistakes/
...

And indepentently from this central repository/project's repository people of
course can do whatever they want (setting up their own gopher servers, gopher
holes, providing content they want to provide through their gopher holes,
developing gopher related software, ...).

The project I have in mind is a community-driven project that concentrates the
rare forces in gopherspace and that can't die if some forces go away or join ...
And one tasks of such a project could be to create and provide gopher related
content (like I said before: for instance newbie instructions). [If this is done
right it can't happen, what has happened several times in gopher history (if I
understood correctly) that a gopher server with valuable content (many gopherians
linked there) goes down and the content is lost/unreachable (this happened to
Begin_Here from hal3000.cx for example).]

I recently verified an idea that came to me after your last mail where you said
that people ask you for permissions to provide content to gopherspace: Today we
could say that there already is such a central place where many gopherians link
to and which creator many gopherians take as an authority - and this is floodgap
and you. (Let me be clear: I hadn't this idea before [when I wrote my first mail]
and I didn't have the purpose to bring down an emperor ...) One fact strengthens
this appearance: gopherproject.org directly redirects to floodgap ...
And this central place is not in the hand of the community and it does not
provide content for the complete community (for instance weather reports are
interresting for people being located next to you) and it strongly relies on a
single person - on your goodwill, on your motivation, on your spare time, on
your opportunity(maybe wrong word) to constantly run and maintain servers ...

Regards,
kaltheat