Richard's Reply
January 1995
It occurred to me as I was sketching out that Call for Participation thing that I sent out a bit ago sort of designed into the system something we haven't talked about in a while: communal editing.
Remember long ago when I suggested, sort of half-serious, that everybody could be an editor of a cyberjournal? Some of the more astute among us kindly reminded me that I was spouting gibberish. They were right, of course, but I think it's worth exploring the possibility of editorial roles being assigned and played in a much different manner here than they are in print publications (and most online publications).
So what I'm proposing, I guess, is that anyone can join the editorial board by simply setting their subscription topics to COWRITE. I think that's just a matter of sending a note to listserv with one line command: set rhetnt-l topics +cowrite. I'll double check on that.
The call for participation suggests that this list and that topic define the place to which submissions and queries can be sent. What I sort of imagine happening is, someone will write a note saying they have saved this really cool thread on XXXX-L. We'll talk with them about shaping the text, getting permissions, whether it should be put on the web/gopher/listserv or all three, who's going to markup the text & how they might construct the hypertext version, etc. Then the submitter(s) and editor(s) almost immediately become collaborators. Who 'officially' represents RhetNet? Both. Presumably someone who starts out coming from necessarily imply that the text is finished, only that it's ready to be viewed and responded to and interacted with, etc.
Whatcha think? How many of you would be interested in hanging out in the COWRITE area to see what comes, to leap into the fray when something pops up that intrigues you?
Will this work, do you think?