Thanks for the very interesting comments about to.be or not.to.be a forum.

I deliberately set up the list this way and will explain why. I appreciate
that the format may not suit everyone, and the list may even fail - as any
list can - but here's the thinking behind what I've done:

- I managed forums for almost ten years at trAce http://trace.ntu.ac.uk
(Simon Mills built them, and I facilitated them along with Helen Whitehead,
Randy Adams and other colleagues). As Simon said, they take a lot of work to
maintain and as Jeremy said, each software entails a new set of skills. They
also cost time and often money to develop, and often require pretty high
bandwidth, thus excluding people on expensive or slow connections. After
years of pining after every new social software that came out, in my last
couple of years at trAce I found myself longing for a simple mailing list!
JISC has search, chat, file-space and a survey tool, so although it looks a
bit clunky it works pretty well. If you haven't already, check out the
website http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/WRITING-AND-THE-DIGITAL-LIFE.html
Btw I did also consider making it a blog or a wiki, but rejected them in
favour of a plain vanilla list. Somewhat retro, don't you think?! The only
downside is that there is no RSS feed but JISC tell me this is coming. The
del,icio.us page looks promising though and I do hope you will all
contribute your bookmarks.

- I deliberately set this list up in a staged way. I knew I wouldn't have
time to look after it until now but I didn't want it to start in dribs and
drabs, so I collected you all together and kept you waiting. Sorry! The
negative effect of that was that when I opened the list everyone came
rushing in and it caused a high volume of traffic but that only lasted no
more than 48 hours, and already we have settled down to a sane conversation.
To respond to Lawrence's point, I also deliberately did not welcome each
person as they signed on, but allowed it to flow on without me until I had
something specific to say. This very much went against the grain of
everything I know about maintaining communities but I decided to try it.

- Finally, after years of working in highly-managed gardens, I like the idea
of swimming in a cold clear stream of ideas. It may hit a few rocks, it may
run dry, but for the moment this is how I'd like to do it and I hope you'll
swim with me for a bit. Needless to say, the stream will also water future
projects, but it's too early yet to know what they will be.

I am so excited by the diversity of people and ideas here, and this is only
the start! Long may it flow~~~~~~

Warm regards to you all

Sue