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Re: Bay Area local garden newsgroup anyone?

Hi Sean and all.  Let me explain my reasons for this proposal.  First off,
I have no intentions of leaving Medit-Plants or encouraging others to do
so.  I love this list.  I see MP and the proposed ba.gardens as
complementary. 

   Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 16:14:37 -0700
   From: "Sean A. O'Hara" <sean.ohara@ucop.edu>

   I had always envisioned Medit-Plants fullfulling this for Bay Area
   folks as well as other areas.  At time, there have been numerous
   'regional' announcements and discussions of local events and resources.
   It seemed to me that since Medit-Plants is such a low volume group
   (compared to many), that this would not be offputting to those to
   whom it wasn't relevant.  Perhaps I am wrong in this assumption.

I can't speak for the non-Bay Area folks having to read our local stuff,
but I have held back on local type postings in part because of the
non-local folks, out of consideration for them.  

There is a difference between usenet and mailing lists.  I often am on one
of each for the same topic.  Mailing lists are often a tighter group, more
personal topics, a smaller number of people, and fewer posts.  Usenet
groups tend to be less personal, involve more people, and can get many many
more posts (of course, there are exceptions on both sides).  If any of you
are familar with ba.food, that's the kind of community I'm thinking of.
Lots of talk, joking around, and even a few flame wars (though I could do
without those!).  Ba.food would never work as a mailing list; it would have
an entirely different character (it would probably be a great mailing list,
but it wouldn't be the same).

   What do Medit-Plants folks think?  It'd be nice to have our group
   encompass type of discussion more routinely (I was not aware some
   felt reticent to post such information).  I wonder if some of our
   group might 'leave' to join this other forum, or if everyone might
   join both anyway?  Local announcements are often useful to those
   from other areas - it gives them insight to what happening locally.
   Important when you visit an area and wonder what you might do while
   you're there.  Also, a large number of Medit-Plants subscribers (at
   this time) are local to the Bay Area.

I would imagine that local annoucements would go to both groups.  But let
me give you an example of a topic I wanted to post on.  What tomato
varieties are good for the Bay Area?  I posted to rec.gardens.edible but
the topic just didn't go anywhere.  I thought about posting it here but
tomatoes? as a big prolonged discussion of varieties and local nurseries
that carried seeds or seedlings, and etc? just didn't seem right for a
Medit list.  I'd like to do the same thing for other non-medit plants grown
in this area.  And it'd be nice to talk about the CRFS meetings and the
various plant sales.  I've always felt like I was too informal when talking
about what I bought and who I met...one post was okay, but on a USENET
group I'd probably chat about it for a few days.

Am I making sense here?  I don't want to hurt this group or step on
anyone's toes.  I've been thinking about this for a while and thought that
a usenet group would be a good way to get the purely local without flooding
this incredibly useful and high-level list with chattiness and non-medit
plant talk.  If Meditplants was a usenet group, I would probably just post
what I wanted to and assume that people who weren't interested would delete
the threads.  And I think a bay area gardening mailing list would be
redundant.  It's mostly the usenet vs mailing list thing, in addition to
the somewhat different subset of gardening topics.

I won't do anything without knowing that I have people's support and it
seems this will generally be a good thing.  

Cyndi

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________
"There's nothing wrong with me.  Maybe there's                     Cyndi Norman
something wrong with the universe." (ST:TNG)                   cnorman@best.com
__________________________________________________ http://www.best.com/~cnorman
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