[INDOLOGY] Clarification Request

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Dear Aleksandar,

Speaking for myself, from my own experience the committee does just what
you say.  It's rather pedestrian:

   - We process membership requests, which means reading applicants' short
   CVs and voting "yes" or "no."  When there are borderline cases, they get
   discussed before voting.   This is the main activity of the committee.
   - We process requests from members to update their email addresses and
   to solve technical issues with the Mailserve software, for example when
   mails bounce because a member's mailbox is full, or when a member posts
   from an email address different from their registration. This is the second
   most time-consuming committee activity.
   - On the rare occasions when there are contentious posts to the public
   INDOLOGY forum, we discuss whether or not intervention is likely to help or
   hinder the conversation and what we might try.  Intervention is rare (once
   a year?) and, in my experience, usually ineffective. :-)
   - Once in a blue moon, we discuss inviting one or more new members to
   join the committee, usually when someone steps down.

Things I do personally:

   - Once a quarter, I pay the rent for the disk space we use, the
   bandwidth and the Mailserve hosting service, and the DNS name
   registration.  I've always just done this; I don't discuss this with the
   committee.
   - I update the indology.info website sporadically in response to new
   information or corrections; I'm not very proud of the website, which is a
   bit old-fashioned in 2019, and not really comprehensive.  I have lots of
   doubts about the website's function and content, but I also have no time to
   reconceive and update it.  When there are tech problems with it, Patrick Mc
   Allister kindly and expertly solves them.  (Thank you, Patrick!)

Things the committee doesn't do:

   - We don't moderate the forum.  When a member posts a message to the
   forum, it immediately goes straight out to all 762 members without
   intervention.  The committee has no privileged control over the
   conversations in the forum.
   - We don't normally discuss what is going on in the public INDOLOGY
   forum.  As individuals, we participate in the INDOLOGY forum discussions
   just like everyone else.

The current committee consists of five active members, Audrey, Wendy,
Philipp, Stefan and myself, as listed on the indology.info website
<http://indology.info/email/email-comm/>.

Best,
Dominik


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