Dear Dominik,
Still, I’d be happy to help with the expenses too.
Best wishes,
Camillo
From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Sent: 05 April 2019 15:50
To: Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh@umich.edu>
Cc: Jonathan Silk <kauzeya@gmail.com>; Indology <indology@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 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[*]. 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@list.indology.info> wrote: