Re: RAT Re: "Dancing Bear" posts

[Ed and Chris <cjeffries@seanet.com>]

I personally _don't_ find "smoke and mirrors" here regarding RatBase.  
The website, as we know, was not enabled to electronically archive all 
posts to the mailing list until 1999.  That leaves a HUGE pile of old 
e-mail, articles, etc. that would require many hundreds of hours of 
volunteer labor to archive, especially in searchable form.  That's over 
and above the hundreds of hours already volunteered by the people who 
created the list and the website in the first place (as Skip was right to 
acknowledge).  Faced with that backlog, and willing to volunteer still 
more time and labor to keep at least some of it alive on the site, they 
did the sensible thing -- they made a selection.  And they've been 
perfectly upfront about their selection being governed by the personal 
biases and priorities of the selectors.  Just as the various RAT 
conferences, like any party, are obviously planned with the biases and 
priorities of their hosts in mind.  RatBase is a party.  The hosts drew 
up their own guest list of ideas.  All are invited to mingle.  Is that 
really a "paradigm of dominance"?  Since when?

At the NYC conference there was a large discussion of "The Electronic 
RAT," specifically dealing with these kinds of issues.  "All agreed," 
says a journal entry posted on the site, that there can and should be a 
plurality of RAT websites and lists, each one free, as all of us are 
free, to define and prioritize the RAT experience as it wishes, the 
better to avoid any one slant becoming a kind of RAT Vatican.  To date 
there's still only one RAT website, simply because no one else has 
bothered to create any.  That's no one's fault -- certainly not the fault 
of the handful of people who _have_ donated the work and time and 
resources to build the site RATs and others currently enjoy (or don't).

More to the point, I remember reading a series of posts from Gaby and 
Nick informing us of the renovations being done on the site and updating 
us on their progress.  I don't recall anyone rushing forward with offers 
to help them in any way.  Those updates included specific descriptions of 
their idea for the (current) "initial entry" of RatBase, which can also 
be found in the "Introduction" on the site.  Their reasons for designing 
it the way they did have been clearly spelled out several times, 
including (just now, in a post which is now archived on the site) the 
editorial biases which made Erik and Nick the most quoted.  So where's 
the "smoke and mirrors"?

This talk of "the database" seems to be confusing RatBase with something 
that doesn't exist.  OK, at present RatBase is not "user friendly" if 
you're using it to locate specific past material.  That's not what it was 
designed to do.  I, too, wish all RAT writing since 1994 or whenever was 
archived and organized and available in database form.  It isn't.  
RatBase isn't pretending to be that database.  RatBase is a gift from 
people with limited time and is intended to make a portion of older "RAT 
lit" available, in a form more "artful" than "archival."  You want a 
better database?  Build one.  Don't expect "them" to hop to it; we're not 
their boss.  

And if you feel that certain RAT ideas or voices are underrepresented, 
why is it someone else's job to do something about it?