Those of you who are familiar with the newsgroup creation
process know that this entails discussing the proposal on news.groups,
with the folks on group-advice, and so forth. The consensus is that the
group should be moderated so as to avoid flamewars and retain at least a
minimal academic focus.
The group will be called sci.political-sci. After a few months we can
split it into various subgroups -- such as sci.political-sci.comparative,
sci.political-sci.intl-relations, and so forth -- if traffic is heavy.
With these facts in mind, I am posting to this list for two reasons.
First, if you would enjoy reading and participating in such a group,
please let me know.
Secondly, I would like to go recruiting for potential moderators. A
moderated newsgroup can exist with only one moderator; however, in my
opinion, multiple moderators are needed for this group. Hopefully we
could get moderators from a variety of backgrounds.
Moderating a group does *not* entail editing posts; it merely involves
approving or rejecting them in toto. The idea is to try and filter out
gratutious insults ("flames") and to try and maintain a reasonably
scholarly tone to the discussion.
It is very surprising that no political science group exists on Usenet;
it is virtually the only social science not to have such a group.
Therefore, if anyone would be interested in helping to moderate a
political science group, I would be grateful if you could drop me a line.
Please include a sentence or two as to what your research interests are.
The more moderators we get, the less work is involved! If you aren't
sure whether or not you want to be a moderator, go ahead and e-mail me --
you need not commit to anything yet.
I would be interested in adding a Latin American specialist to the
moderation panel.
Even if you are not interested in being a moderator, let me know of your
support for the group so I can keep you updated on the status of the
proposal.
Please address any questions to me and not to the mailing list. My
e-mail address is cbstone@phoenix.princeton.edu.
Chris Stone