[extropy-chat] Extropy: "Best of the List"

Hal Finney hal at finney.org
Sun Jun 12 16:53:28 UTC 2005


As I recall, in the early years of the Extropians list we had a rather
restrictive republication policy.  Authors were promised that their works
would have only limited distribution and would not be published elsewhere.

In retrospect I think this was a mistake, it would have been better to
treat postings as being for public distribution.  I don't think it would
have really inhibited discussion.  But the net of the early 90s was not
the same as today, the ideas were far more controversial and "crazy",
so it is perhaps understandable that the list was trying to create a
private coccoon for free discussion.

I would imagine that any republication of these messages would require
getting individual permission from the authors.  Where messages involve
quotes of other people's messages, as is often the case, everyone involved
would have to agree.

For a while I tried running a list which re-posted selected messages
from Extropians.  I had to get permission from each author to allow
his messages to be redistributed.  Where they had quotes, I had to make
sure that each other being quoted had given permission.  When I could
not obtain that, I sometimes hand-edited the quoted portions to remove
them or substitute a brief summary (copyright applies to presentation,
not content).  Needless to say, it was a lot of work and I did not keep
it up for more than a few months.  But I understood that I had to follow
such procedures in order to be consistent with the promises that had
been made to authors posting to the list.

Unfortunately these limitations will make it difficult to have a full
public process for choosing and evaluating messages.  Not only would
you have to secure permission for the messages you mean to publish,
you also have to get permission for the potentially much larger body of
messages that you might want to open up for comment and consideration
in terms of selecting the finalists.

I'd be curious to hear about what your plans are for getting around this
difficulty in terms of publishing a "best of the list" from the early
days.  I do think this would be a tremendously valuable and interesting
picture of the development of transhumanism as it first hit the net,
and I hope you can find a way to make the many creative and stimulating
postings available to a wider audience.

Hal



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