Re: How did you get into this business?

Henry van Cleef (vancleef@bga.com)
Sat, 3 Jun 1995 19:49:20 -0500 (CDT)

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As Pat Berry said
>
> Here's a question I've been wondering about for some time: How and why
> do people get into the FAQ-maintaining business? I know some newsgroups
> have a formal selection process with a vote and everything, but I
> suspect this is the exception. I'd be interested in hearing how you
> became maintainers.
>
I fell into it. About a year ago, there were several posters on
rec.antiques asking about getting old radios and acoustic phonographs
to work, and some of us who had some answers to those questions decided
that breaking out a new newsgroup where we wouldn't bore the other
antiquers to death with a lot of tech talk would be a good idea.
Through the discussion and vote period, it became clear to me that
someone familiar with old electronics needed to take a hand in assuring
that newcomers to the hobby had a source of information that would
allow them to get their antiques working safely and reliably. I've
been a Usenet reader for many years, and have always felt that a good
FAQ was mandatory, to set the tone of a group, establish what it was
and wasn't, and so forth. As a retired electrical engineer, with
knowledge of part of the topic, and with knowledge of the mechanics of
Usenet and software, I offered to take a lead in making a good FAQ
happen. We also had offers of help from people who had solid knowledge
of acoustic phono restoration, and quickly worked out a "share the
wealth" plan where I would take on some of the electronics stuff and
take on setting things up for periodic postings to the correct groups
in addition to the new rec.antiques.radio+phono group. As a result,
the day after the group was newgrouped, we had a FAQ ready to post, and
we hit the ground running. We did have a pretty good idea what some of
the standard questions would be, and spent some time answering them
before they actually did become the same old question asked over and
over.

As the group has matured, we have picked up a lot of additional
material on various things, and our FAQ is about to grow from five
sections to nine, all of which are still probably longer than they
ought to be. Much of what was later incorporated into the FAQ was
worked out as separate response postings on various topics, where
people came up with information, posted it, and discussion followed.
I've been very specific that my role in this is as editor, not author,
and the result is that we have gotten many valuable contributions from
various people and have included them, taking care to credit the author.

One place where having a good FAQ available from day one has been
valuable has been in dealing with some rather thorny charter issues
peculiar to the topic, particularly that of keeping focus on old
electronics vs. becoming dominated by "high-end" vacuum tube audio and
rock-and-roll electronics. We coexist with several other groups,
particularly in the audio and amateur radio areas, and have spent some
time defining this group as something specific, not just another group
to cross-post to.

I'll be the first to admit that we still don't have it "wired" in the
charter interpretation area. Right now we are struggling with a spate
of "hit and run" commercial-type postings, where the poster may be
posting on-topic, but isn't contributing to the group, and may or may
not be perpetrating a scam of some sort. Most of these come from
places like AOL, Delphi, Prodigy, and Netcom.IX accounts, and the
problem is not unique to our group by a long shot. While we, like
everyone else, have gotten carpet-bombed by the Canter and Siegel type
stuff, I've found that posting a very quick response indicating that
this is what it is saves the group from long threads flaming the
so-called "spam" industry.

My involvement in all this is not completely altruistic. As a
professional historian, the topics covered by this group are central to
my work, and my role in this area is on my CV as a selling point. The
quid pro quo in this is that while I get something of value from the
experience that I can point to as a professional credential, the
newsgroup gets a FAQ that is well-received.

-- 
***********************************************************
Hank van Cleef  vancleef@bga.com  vancleef@tmn.com
***********************************************************

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