Dear Northerners  Re emails & blogs

I am writing to you because you all appear to be working on group communication

Yesterday, Tuesday, Khun Ja from APWLD prepared a leaflet to advertise a meeting for 24th Feb and on it

there was the email address nccnclimatejusticenow@gmail.com

This caused some confusion as I had never received mail from this source and I knew of the existence of

northernclimatechangenetwork@gmail.com which never sends me mail and also has recently appeared

northernclimate@gmail.com which has now started to send mail.

In order to confirm the new address I  sent a mail which did not

bounce back but had no reply.

I then phoned Caroline from whom I eventually ascertained the origin of the new address from which I now write.

Ja & Tomoko and I have been talking of late about difficulties of e-communication and the managing of emails

and sender’s lists.

Some folk have many emails and there is much work in reading ( or failing to because of overload ) and responding.

One thing I find very difficult is when there are multiple responses to a mail. This may be from more than one

recipient at varying times, who may  may not have seen the responses from others, and make more than one response.

As a result most of us are somewhat in the dark most of the time.

Another problem associated with this way of communicating is that many folk do not respond so one does not know how they feel.

I suggest the best way to resolve this situation is to go over to a blog style of corresponding. Then everybody has equal information

which is serially recorded and can easily be referred to by simply scrolling up and down a blog stream.

As far as I know we are yet to enter a dangerous situation where our adversaries (e.g. the fossil fuel lobby) will try to hack our site

or spy on our activities, so openness seems the best policy.

If we use the blog approach our time spent on emails should fall more than any increase of time spent on a website blog

and we should be better informed.

We also have the problem of new email information coming in as more folk register an interest ( yesterday’s leaflet

produced another 12 or so, some of whom were also on other lists for sure).

How do we deal with this swarm of data. More data than may be usable perhaps?

The website of the International Citizens of Chiang Mai has many entries on Climate and other green issues

and has now had one year of development and now a brand new presentation.

http://www.ourchiangmai.com requires readers to register so they can post a comment. The registration form has space for

User Name, email address , First Name (which can have spaces and be an organisation name) , and Last name, Either name

can include Thai or Roman characters.

This then becomes a simple database which is only accesssible to or administrator (Alan Bull) who is at a safe distance

from “People of Influence” on snowy London town.

So what best to do?

My suggestion is to put new posts and try to have English & Thai (their posting need not be simultaneous) on ourchiangmai.com

and ask our network to include in their www access routine, a visit to the site and to invite registration and comments.

Then we will need to coordinate sending out emails to the various lists to ask for participation.

May I ask all to respond to this email via ourchiangmai.com and thereby get some experience with what is being suggested.

Remember the last word on this issue may be a little time coming and require a few visits.

I sincerely hope you find these suggestions helpful.

Yours in Solidarity

Ricky