So much for techies

Preparations for the Regional Conference on Gender and Communications Policy was on its final run when the idea for a complementary email conference came up. Everyone agreed it was a good one. But can it be set up in less than two weeks? Though Isis moderates an email conference called asia-women, the technical aspect of this has been mainly left to our APC-affiliated email service provider. As for the proposed email conference on gender and media in Asia, the idea was to have it hosted by Isis commercial ISP.

Of course we can have the email conference up and running in ten days, I said. Less a confident estimate than a prayer, now that I recall what I went through to set up asia-gendermedia.

Dealings with our ISP, I've found out from past experiences can be a pain specially since tech people here are notorious for speaking a language of their own. I decided I needed to talk the talk, use terms they will understand so that I can get the work done. Things, of course would have been much simpler if we'd asked our non-profit email service provider. But at that time, this group kept having some technical problems. There was one full week when we were not receiving any mails. Again, I cannot wait for technical kinks to be straingthened out with our friends over at Email Center; I've been given a short timeline.

Before calling up our ISP, I made sure I have a list of how I'd like our email conference to be set up. I've also read up on a FAQ on Majordomo, since this is the mailing list program our ISP uses. I told the technical support people I want a mailing list set up for Isis; they said I should call up their account department people. ???? The account department people after hearing what I have in mind said I call up their Network Operations Center. So I did, only to be told by someone in NOC that I should go back to tech support. At tech support, I repeated my request. Straining to keep my cool, I told the guy on the other end of the line that they have passed me around four times already. So he gave me an instruction to email majordomo@list.infocom.sequel.net with a message that says "subscribe list."

Immediately, I knew that he still did not understant my situation. But just to humour him I did as he instructed. The ISP's automated mass mailer sent back a list of the mailing lists they host: a short eight which is interesting considering that this ISP is one of the biggest in the country. I called up the tech guy and told him he gave me the wrong intructions. "I don't want to sign up for any of the mailing lists you run. I want you to set up one for me." "Oh," he said "you'll need to set up your server for that." "But we don't have a leased line, only a dial-up connection. We want you to host our mailing list." "Umm I think you should call NOC." Huh, so much for tech people.

The guy on NOC (not the same one I talked to earlier) sounded helpful. He said, after I've explained what I want , that he can set up the mailing list in two days, at no extra expense for Isis. Finally, I told myself, a thinking techhead. I told him about the confusion over at the tech support. He said that their company does not get that much request for mass mailer hosting. Mostly they get requests for webpage hosting, ftp, and email.  My one week almost over, I made the guy at NOC promise that we'll test run over the weekend. Which did not happen because their network got bugged down on some major problems. The NOC guy had to bail out from our test run, so he can help bail out their whole network.

Monday, I called up NOC. At this point, I asked the guy from NOC for his name. I figured, if we're on a first name basis, he wouldn't think of me as just one of those irksome clients. Joseph said he's already working on it, and asked for the name of the email conference. Asia-gender&media, I said, if their program allows the ampersand or asia-gendermedia if it doesn't. Meanwhile I worked on our welcome message and later sent this to Joseph, along with the initial list of participants.

Tuesday. Joseph called and said we can test run asia-gendermedia (no ampersand for you). The test run went well. It was successful. I told the office asia-gendermedia is ready to rock and roll. By nine p.m. asia-gendermedia's welcome message was in cyberspace. Once it was set up, running asia-gendermedia was a breeze. Well almost. I did have a ready supply of daily highlights from the real conference to mail. But getting people in the actual conference and in the email conference to interact proved difficult. For one, we did not have enough time to psyche up the people on the list about the real conference. In the end I had to "beg" some of our closest colleagues on the list to send messages and feedback to those attending the regional conference. A couple of them did, but getting the participants of the regional conference to participate in the email conference was next to impossible. There was no phone line on the conference venue nor in the living quarters. The nearest line was in the reception counter in the hotel administrative building, a good 150 meters from the conference hall. I had to schedule my trip to the phone jack to post to asia-gendermedia, and also to send the participants emails. Needles to say, the conference participants can only type their email messages during lunch and dinner breaks. So much for interaction between the two conferences.

Considering all the technical hassles, asia-gendermedia did manage to attract attention and new subscribers. When we started, there were 40 initial participants -- mostly participants in the regional conference, personal contacts and individuals and organizations we've had dealings with in the past. Now, three months since it started, asia-gendermedia has around 60 subscribers. So far only three list subscribers have dropped out. 

If you build it, they might come Asia-gendermedia is three months old already. It had had successes on the onset. But now the conference is somewhat silent. As moderator I still receive email from individuals and groups who have heard about it. Some requests for papers that had been posted in the conference before, some are request for membership, some are quries about how to reach so and so who wrote such and such paper that had been posted in the conference. A tiny minority are feedbacks about past postings, which never fail to brighten my day.

So far the postings have been all about the regional conference. I realize I should of course be starting a new "thread" in the discussion. But though I am the moderator, running asia-gendermedia is a group effort. Until Isis has settled down in its new house, and until we have decided where to steer the discussion, I fear some participants might lose interest in the conference.

Hopefully, we will pick up again by start of November. Meanwhile I have time to reflect on how I have fared as moderator. Basically, I've survived by oidou. That is I do not have any prior technical training, only common sense, a fair amount of daring and lots of patience. I may know now that Majordomo is a PERL-based program and that a closed mailing list is different from an open mailing, but I cannot tell you how our ISP their mass mailer even if my life defended on it. Which is just fair, since part of what we pay our ISP is technical assistance. I've a background in participatory research, training, and conflict resoultion, which makes me sort of literate on the basic tricks of facilitating group discussuions. But facilitating an email conference is still a different ballgame. Lacking concrete training on it, I have learned to "watch" how moderators of other email conferences do it.

I work in Isis' resource center, and part of my work is to scan incoming information. Having gone through piles of email conference postings, I have developed certain "likes" and "dislikes" about how email conferences are run. This, what I call "user-end taste," have helped me sort out my role as conference moderator. As a user subscriber to other email conferences, I realize that a "silent" conference does not mean that people are not taking note of what's being posted. One time I wrote Maureen James that Isis may not have actively participated in the conference, but we did read and circulated in our own network the postings we picked up from gk97.

I am also now realizing that women in Asia seem to approach electronic networking differently from women in other regions, particularly those from the North. In real-life forums and conferences, we tend take a backseat to see how the discussion is shaping up and where it is leading before we put in our ideas. I myself, relatively a forward person in real-life, take a long time to compose my idea before jumping into any electronic discussion. I am resolved that I should take care to be sensitive and critical of the particular cultural issues in electronic networking.

We learn from our problems

During the first two weeks of the email conference, I was posting a number of really long documents until an organization in Cambodia pointed out that my postings were clogging their system. It seems that NGOs in Cambodia are allowed only a relatively small disk space for incoming emails. There were also a couple of addresses that kept bouncing back the long documents posted in the email conference. Something has to be done to balance on one hand, the different technical capabilties of the participants; and on the other hand, to continue sending important documents which are often 10kb-long or more. So instead of sending the papers to everybody, I posted a list of the papers that are available via email and their respective length, along with a list of the other papers and how to get in touch with their writers.

People were told to post requests for papers to the moderator. This is of course additional work, since I will have to send each and every paper to each and every individual that request for them . Still, the needs of the participants come first before those of the moderator. :-)

Pi Villanueva (Isis International-Manila)