[ZDP] The 'central person' question

[Rik Hoekstra]

>Hi everybody,
>
> I was just thining. This whole 'central person' issue has been more or
> less forced upon us by the publishers. Although the ZDP always had
> someone who took on the role of spokesperson and tried to keep the
> discussion going (it was me for a while, we've had Stephan, now Tom,
> others contributed here too), it was never necessary to define it so
> well.

Right

>
> Perhaps for now we should keep it that way. If any individual is
> *suited* to be that kind of person, that will become evident
> automatically. If the publishers complain; we're not into this for a
> published book, we're just into this to write documentation. Of course a
> published book would be nice. Perhaps the publishers will talk to
> individual ZDP members and try to do deals with them. That's fine too,
> really. We're making ZBook, our copyright is shared, so we always get
> the credit for what we write anyway if we use the Open Publication
> license.

Yep

>
> So let's just continue with what we're doing and let things progress as
> they do for now. A spokesperson can talk to the publishers for us.
> Explain to the publishers why we're like this (we're ad hoc and
> anarchistic!), that we can't commit easily right now because of this.
> Then let's see what happens.
>
> This may be a dumb idea, but I'm just throwing it into the group to see
> what people think.
>

I like it. It will probably be hard anyway to get a full commitment from
someone to be spokesman for a longer period of time unless that someone has
something at stake.
And anyway as the whole ZDP this is voluntary effort put into documentation
by us, we can only make promises and there could be no more than moral
sanctions if we do not comply with them.
Let's keep our comfortable anarchism then and agree about some practices in
contributing and abide by those 'rules'.

anarchistically-yours

Rik