Date:         Wed, 29 May 2002 14:50:40 EDT
Reply-To:     FrankGRUN@AOL.COM
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Frank Grunthaner <FrankGRUN@AOL.COM>
Subject:      More Musings on the Updated FAQ Proposition
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Let me repeat my amazement at the number of personal email responders to my
FAQ upgrade proposition who indicate that they lurk on the list but refuse to
post because of the type of responses, both to the list and personally. On
one hand, this is very depressing in that the tone and style of responses can
inhibit a wealth of interchange. For the other side of the coin, I am excited
about the true depth of the resources of this community.

But I wanted to put out a few comments in response to some suggestions by
Stan and others as to the form this should take and possible media issues.

Firstly as to the Bentley organizational structure, I feel this is a good
beginning as far as the technical topics go. A Bentley supplement is a major
project, but should someone want to orchestrate such an effort I would
clearly support it. Additions to the camping and owners manual are also very
nice concepts but entail more work and commitment than I originally
envisioned. Kudo's to those who will take this on!

My original model goes along the lines of Jan Vandenbrande's Archive, Racing
Page and Water-cooled VW FAQ which can be found at
http://www.nwlink.com/~vdb/cars.html . This collection ranges from the FAQ's
proper through links, dissertations, email summaries and digests. This
somewhat disorganized freeform approach was collected together by many
individuals and sent to Jan for integration and posting. Now, I'm not
suggesting Jan's Archive replace our archive ... leave our searchable
archives in place, just provide a gleaned overlayer.

Again, my concern is to increase the level of information content in the
newbie post of reoccurring issues, and to help filter BS from gold in the
archive material. Of course, such filtering might lead to a minority report,
but c'est la vie.

On the issue of listee and other web pages. I truly applaud the creativity,
time and effort lavished on so many personal web pages with topical Vanagon
and VW information. Unfortunately, individual web pages tend to disappear
over time (often short time, not long time). I have a list of hundreds of
dead links that I once referred to routinely. One possible solution is for
such web owners to forward their material to our central resource. This more
public page might survive the vagaries of ISPs better. Note that Jan's page
is increasingly hard to find because of changing links.

Finally, I would support the availability of modestly priced CD's of the FAQ
groups and/or the Archives, so long as the material was still available
freely by electronic access. Perhaps one of our vendors could be suckered in
to taking on the distribution and sales of such. The possibility of
supporting our underlying technology is appealing.

Karl's comments about the sticker experiences should just remind us that the
true rewards of volunteerism is only in one's own sense of accomplishment and
contribution. To this end, the contributions of all to these efforts need to
be recognized by binding the author/authors information to the FAQ topic
generated.

Just comments and suggestions.

A note to all who have emailed in support of the FAQ proposition: Be assured
that your material is gratefully acknowledged and is directed to a new folder
on my desktop. I will answer ASAP following the current Martian crunch.

Frank Grunthaner