Siouan List, First Posting

[Koontz John E]

I believe everyone who wanted to subscribe has done so now. So, here is a
first posting.  It's old news, because it's simply a slight redaction of
the original announcement, forwarded for archival purposes.  I've been
holding off on making any postings because I haven't had anything
particularly news-worthy or discussion-worthy to pass along.  This
shouldn't stop any of you from posting, of course.  If you look far enough
down below you'll find the instructions for this.  In brief, send and
reply to siouan at lists.colorado.edu.

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Dear Fellow Siouanist:  

With a little help from the list management at the University of Colorado
I have created an email list for Siouanists, siouan at lists.colorado.edu. 
I'm inviting you to join the list, if you are interested.  You are not
automatically a member.  This is just an announcement.  You must join
voluntarily. It is perfectly understandable that some of you may not wish
to subscribe, either from a current lack of interest, or from a wish to
keep your email at a minimum.  I can't promise that the list will be
active enough to be a problem in that respect, of course, and members need
not contribute anything to join. 

The list is intended as a channel for announcements and a forum for
discussion of the Siouan languages, primarily from a linguistic
perspective, including descriptive, comparative, practical and theoretical
issues.  Any kind of language-related issues, including discussions of
educational materials, may arise from time to time at the option of the
subscribers.

My intention is to maximize utility in this role to specialists -
linguists and anthropological linguists with a specific interest in the
Siouan and related language families - and to minimize traffic from
non-specialists wanting, say, to argue the Mandan-Welsh hypothesis, or the
recently popular Turkish-Dakotan hypothesis, or to see if someone can
provide them with a good name for their child, or the occasional pet dog. 
Many of these questions are fun, of course, in moderation, and answering
some kinds of questions can be a worthy act, but such questions tend to
find their way to one anyway, without providing a specific channel for it. 

So, in order to maximize what I might somewhat diffidently refer to as the
professional use of the list, without making a lot of work for myself, I
have opted to start off with several policies: 

- All subscriptions must be approved by the list owners, currently just
  me, John Koontz, though I have no aversion to sharing this role if
  anyone is interested.  This complicates joining slightly, but keeps
  discussants from joining entirely of their own volition. 

- Contributions are not subjected to an approval process or editing of any
  sort, but are accepted only from members.  As usual, the software
  detects membership by the address from which your email originates.
  So, if you have several accounts, always use one of them for interaction
  with the list. If you need change your account, first unsubscribe, then
  change, then resubscribe.

- Unless you change the address by hand, the reply address is the list,
  not the sender of the message.  Be careful about including private
  messages to the sender in your reply!  They go straight to the list
  without any possible intervention on my part.

I probably won't be particularly rigorous about monitoring subscriptions. 
I'm certainly not going to require academic credentials or personal
recommendations.  I may consult with the list if I have any questions. 

TO SUBSCRIBE TO LIST SIOUAN

Send email to listproc at lists.colorado.edu, without a subject, with the
following contents

    subscribe siouan your name

For example:

    subscribe siouan James O. Dorsey

No quotation marks are required.  

Sending this command will result indirectly in the list owner or owners
receiving a letter asking them to approve the subscription, which, in due
course, they will wake up and do.  

TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM LIST SIOUAN

Send email to listproc at lists.colorado.edu, without a subject, and with the
contents:

    unsubscribe siouan

Note that your name is omitted when unsubscribing.  

Also note that this must come from the same email address that you
subscribed from.  If you're on travel and using a different adress, or if
you've moved to a new address, or if your system has redefined your
address for various good reasons, you can't unsubscribe by yourself.  In
that case, contact the list owner, currently at john.koontz at colorado.edu,
and I will manually unsubcribe you.  Unless you do find yourself in a
predicament of this nature, you don't need my assistance or permission to
unsubscribe. 

The usual mistake when unsubscribing is to send the command to the list
instead of the command processor at listproc at lists.colorado.edu.

TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO LIST SIOUAN

Send email to siouan at lists.colorado.edu.  In this case I strongly
recommend a subject line, though there is no way I can enforce that
requirement - as far as I know at the moment! 

TO POST A RESPONSE TO A LETTER YOU GET FROM LIST SIOUAN

Simply reply to the letter with your email software.  The reply address of
letters on the list is set to the list.  If this isn't done, people end up
responding automatically to the sender, and no series of letters ever
develop.  I've never been on a list that didn't quickly switch to this
policy, so I've decided to try starting with it.   

Please do not include private notes to the author in your replies, because
we'll all see them.  Probably we'll enjoy it, but we might not, and you
and the author might not. I have some experience in this line, and know
whereof I speak.

In general, always check the to-field of a letter before you dispatch it. 
Software does the darnedest things. 

TO REPLY PRIVATELY TO THE AUTHOR OF A POSTING YOU GET FROM LIST SIOUAN

Send a letter to the author, or, if you reply to the posting, take care to
edit the to-field to use the author's private address instead of the list
address.  The list address is siouan at lists.colorado.edu.  This is the one
you don't want.  The author's list should be in the posting somewhere.  

SUMMARY OF ADDRESSES

list name:                        siouan
list email address:               siouan at lists.colorado.edu 
email address for subscriptions:  listproc at lists.colorado.edu
list owner email address:         john.koontz at colorado.edu
overseer of lists.colorado.edu:   listmaster at lists.colorado.edu