[INDOLOGY] mea culpa and Dominik's contribution

Fri Apr 5 16:10:02 UTC 2019

Dear Dominik,

Still, I’d be happy to help with the expenses too.

Best wishes,

Camillo

From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>
Sent: 05 April 2019 15:50
To: Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh at umich.edu>
Cc: Jonathan Silk <kauzeya at gmail.com>; Indology <indology at list.indology.info>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] mea culpa and Dominik's contribution

Dear Madhav and Jonathan, it's kind of you to offer, and I imagine many other people would be equally willing to contribute if I put a big Patreon button on the website.  Over the years and with the help of various committees membersI have thought about different business models for the list. I don't know if you remember, but at one time I tried to run a little Amazon bookshop on the website, with curated indological titles.  I would have got a fraction of a cent for each Amazon sale through that channel.  But it didn't meet a real need and wasn't used.  At another time I had some website pages at indology.info<http://indology.info> that listed publishers.  Charging for that would have been a more obvious way of getting some income, but I never wanted the entanglement with billing, correspondence, tax, etc.  So that was always a free service to publishers and eventually I decided just not to do it.  Another obvious model would be to bring the forum into H-Asia, and we nearly did that, some years back.  However, H-Asia imposes some limits on what a member-list can do, including having to pay to post job advertisements, and we didn't want those kinds of stricture.  Another model would be to use a university-hosted Mailman installation.  After all, INDOLOGY enjoyed the generous and free support of the U. of Liverpool for many years when it first started.  But I have moved around different institutions in my career, and my experience has been that universities have short memories where digital support is concerned.  You set something up, and then five years later you get sharp emails from the service admins saying that they are going to pull the plug.  UCL was very bad when I left, deleting my files without notice.  Vienna has been better, that way.  I think I was traumatized by the whole BlackBox affair in the mid-90s, when the U. of Washington summarily deleted all the marvellous indological materials that had been made public for years by Tom Ridgeway[*<http://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology_list.indology.info/1997-July/008892.html>].  Since then, I've never really trusted university computing departments to have a long view.  University libraries are institutionally concerned with long-term preservation, but libraries curate static data, not functioning services.

So I arrived at the counter-intuitive position that running the website and Mailman as a private individual was likely to provide a more stable and long-lasting environment than working with a university.   It is also the path of least resistance to just keep the service afloat and not to bother myself or others with all the complications of collecting money.  This takes the least number of brain cycles for me, and leaves me most free to actually do the things I love, including indology.  I'm now a bit sorry I mentioned it publicly, but I was writing hastily and in a spirit of full disclosure.

Something that I failed to mention in my response about how the committee works is that we have a weekly rota.  I think everyone knows this, but members of the committee take weekly turns being on duty.  So at any one time, only one of the committee members deals with correspondence or other tasks (but we all vote on issues and applications all the time).

Thanks again!
Dominik

On Fri, 5 Apr 2019 at 07:14, Madhav Deshpande via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:
Dear Dominik,

     My reaction is similar to Jonathan's.  I would be willing to contribute toward the cost of maintaining the Indology list.  Please consider setting up a way for us to share the cost.  With best wishes,

Madhav M. Deshpande
Professor Emeritus
Sanskrit and Linguistics
University of Michigan
[Residence: Campbell, California]

On Fri, Apr 5, 2019 at 12:51 AM Jonathan Silk via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:
Dear Dominik
I am perhaps not the only member who felt more than a twinge of guilt in reading that you have been paying for storage out of your pocket. While I agree that simply repeating previous posts is a very bad idea (I would have said for reasons of legibility and page space, not storage cost), I would be more than delighted to contribute to the costs of funding Indology, and I am sure I am not the only one. Perhaps there is a way (sorry, I know this is more work for someone!) to make a page where I can make a donation? Paypal? Or--I'm blushing here--such a page already exists but I don't know about it?

Jonathan

--
J. Silk
Leiden University
Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, LIAS
Matthias de Vrieshof 3, Room 0.05b
2311 BZ Leiden
The Netherlands

copies of my publications may be found at
https://leidenuniv.academia.edu/JASilk
_______________________________________________
INDOLOGY mailing list
INDOLOGY at list.indology.info<mailto:INDOLOGY at list.indology.info>
indology-owner at list.indology.info<mailto:indology-owner at list.indology.info> (messages to the list's managing committee)
http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options or unsubscribe)
_______________________________________________
INDOLOGY mailing list
INDOLOGY at list.indology.info<mailto:INDOLOGY at list.indology.info>
indology-owner at list.indology.info<mailto:indology-owner at list.indology.info> (messages to the list's managing committee)
http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options or unsubscribe)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20190405/60c33cc0/attachment.htm>