Dear all,
First, I want to express appreciation to Dominik (and Patrick McAllister) for all the work done to  to make the list possible. It is much appreciated by many, including myself, even if I am mostly just a lurker—it is how I have access to Madhav’s delightful verses.
I also support other voices to expand the committee to include other geographical areas, specifically India, specifically, with a woman to achieve gender parity.
I recognize that it is not currently a governing body, but still, the formation of a committee signals a kind of representational status and ideology with it.  Even if the responsibilities are negligible, still it feels odd that on an Indology list, no one located in India sits on the committee. 
All best,

Loriliai Biernacki

CU Boulder sits upon land within the territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples, and 48 contemporary tribal nations are historically tied to the lands that make up the state of Colorado.





From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces@list.indology.info> on behalf of Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info>
Reply-To: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2019 at 2:06 PM
To: "Uskokov, Aleksandar" <aleksandar.uskokov@yale.edu>
Cc: Indology <indology@list.indology.info>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Clarification Request

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.

Best,
Dominik