I also think newsletters have become obsolete, and publishing an online newsletter is the worst of all worlds -- the information is more accessible on web sites than in a PDF and is likely more timely, and the requirement to publish the PDF is a waste of volunteer efforts for an unneeded product. They should remove chronicler from the list of required offices and let each group decide what it wants to do. (Debatable Lands publishes a digital newsletter; the last time I asked why we bother I got a mix of shrugs and "sentimental value", but nobody really saying it's useful. I don't know why our chronicler -- who is a wonderful person who contributes to the group in other ways too -- still does it.)
The fragmentation problem is real, and I don't know what to do about it. We aren't even quite at the point of being able to just syndicate everything to one web site automatically -- even if Facebook, Twitter, and email lists supported RSS or something like it, the norms of usage among those are too different so you'd get gibberish. Central gathering requires a curator -- that would be a useful thing for a chronicler to do, but staying on top of it would be a ton of work and it's not useful if somebody doesn't stay on top of it, so I don't know what the path is. Wikis, perhaps, but that risks just creating more fragments.
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Date: 2011-11-30 02:51 am (UTC)The fragmentation problem is real, and I don't know what to do about it. We aren't even quite at the point of being able to just syndicate everything to one web site automatically -- even if Facebook, Twitter, and email lists supported RSS or something like it, the norms of usage among those are too different so you'd get gibberish. Central gathering requires a curator -- that would be a useful thing for a chronicler to do, but staying on top of it would be a ton of work and it's not useful if somebody doesn't stay on top of it, so I don't know what the path is. Wikis, perhaps, but that risks just creating more fragments.
Sigh.