Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 23:45:51 -0400
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re:  Capclave
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

Many thoughts, from this thread:

* I had a great time at Capclave.  Some folks that I had hoped to see
didn't show up, and what is jokingly refered to as "the Real World (tm)"
poked its scaly little head in a couple of times, but by and large,
things went well, I thought.  Good work, guys!

* This fandom stuff is all volunteer.  One of the effects of this is
that the person who does something has a very wide latitude.  If you're
not paying somebody do do something, you have no control.  I've seen
several organizations seriously damaged when somebody tried to crack
down, and the people doing the work said "%&%** at  at  you" and walked off.

Selection of Guest(s) of Honor is up to the Con Chair.  I found Mr.
Pollotta to be witty, friendly and approachable.

Selection of typefaces is up to the person who does the program book.
I've spent the last couple of years reading massive numbers of Web
pages; reasonably sized Courier is a real pleasure compared to some of
the crap out there.  (Six- point Birdseed Sans Serif, orange on black,
with animations on both sides is more common than you'd hope.)

Selection of format for the WSFA Journal is up to the Secretary.  I
sympathize with Keith's attempts to keep the printed journal and the
online journal as close as possible.  Trying to do this with any word
processor I'm aware of is somewhere between "thankless task" and
"termites are eating my brain!!".  And I like the "page x of y" page
numbering.  It's used professionally where you might have problems if a
sheet drops off the bottom of the stack.

* Copyright.  This discussion seems to have settled out OK.  One of the
advantages of putting a copyright notice on something is that it's an
indicator of the author.  I saw something on the Web a while back where
somebody was writing a book and having the devil's own time tracking
down the authors of some of the materials he wanted to use (BBS posts).
  "Copyright Joe Blow" gives you some indication of who to look for.
And there are nasties.  "Copywrite" and "(c)" are meaningless.  It's
"Copyright" and unicode 00A9 (little c in a circle).

* If somebody wants to let other people use their work, they can release
  it under a "Creative Commons" license.  See
<http://www.creativecommons.org> for details.  (Kit's "Congressional
Research Project" <http://www.zipbeep.org/congress> is released under a
CC license, for example.)  The Free Software Foundation (the GNU folks)
have a similar license <http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html#FDL>,
but I like the CC licenses better.  The FSF has 'way too much legal
gibberish, IMHO.

--
Steve Smith                                           sgs at aginc.net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."