When I started this message Rich had not written his but I think it is the right place to post it…
Hello, this is Brigitte here. I just want to make clear beforehand, this message is NOT intended to offend anyone or to personally attack someone. Also I ask the reader to please bear in mind that I may have used a word wrongly as it is not my native language here so please do not jump on me, just ask me if something is not clear. I have thought long and hard about this message (especially as some people nowadays might only see me “with the whistle maker’s wife’s hat on) and if I could send it but being so long on the board since the beginning of C&F, only being myself and nobody’s girlfriend or wife I am sure I can tell you. I wrote, read and re-wrote it again and again and hope I can make my thoughts clear enough for easy digesting. I would like to contribute the following to the board on which I feel at home for many years now but have had very uncomfortable times in the last few months. So here I’ll walk on thin ice and again hope it will not break. I probably have to add I always have in mind that this is “A whistler’s board” although my message may not mention this fact often below.
The last three months the board has turned dramatically in vibes. It also has grown tremendously by new members as it has not done in the 4 years before altogether. I like to make you aware that there are 906 logged contributors and a few thousand newsletter receivers now. We have had a growing rate of +50%!!! since the 16th of December 2001 on the board. This IS great but too fast for growing of groups often leads into communication problems as we have seen recently. Regarding the recent big growth I would like to state that the different levels of “collective board knowledge” in our community does vary quite a lot, the archive can help catching up and the mentioned FAQ in another thread, if it is going to be a project, I think will be also a good tool to balance out the different knowledge level of members. (BTW Rich, thanks to the statistics, archive and search functions… ehm and the space itself!)
As natural with human beings there comes a point when the amount of people (here contributors) meets what I would call the “social peace limit” (I do not know what ethnological scientists call it in English). When reaching this amount of members (which is still provable in native tribes i.e in the Amazon region) usually (bloody!) fights start and in the end the tribe splits in half and separates so the new tribes get again to their comfortable limit of members etc. In our group as we already found out this does not work as “there is nowhere else to go to for a whistler” than Dale’s place and a great place it is, too. BTW during the last months when I sat head shaking in front of my computer screen on what was happening I started to wonder a few times if the whole board might be an experimental project “Dale’s psychological test field in mass dynamic laws” 
(oh..well Dale, I thought I better be honest here, I know it is the crystal people in fact who are leading you). Ever looked from this point of view when the debates got really hot? It can make it all look pretty different and helps clearing the head again.
In all these years there have been discussions held on the board regarding beliefs, ethics and morals but as the group was still quite small compared to the message board or the newsletter subscribers we have today, it did not escalate in anything close to the state as it did in the last few months. When the group is smaller there tends to be a bigger chance that a contributor can explain themselves better and react/correct faster. When in a bigger group a misunderstanding comes up it can escalate as quick as another contributor who also may have misunderstood jumped in before the originator of the misunderstanding is able too explain better and fast we are in the defending/offending circle. Also when a group is small there usually are less different or new characters to cope with and it is easier to keep track in the special ways some people explain themselves. Since the community has grown so fast it feels much harder for me to keep track where one or the other contributor is coming from and I find myself checking profiles more often to refresh my image of the person than I had to do a year ago. Do you do this occasionally, just a question I thought to bring in mind?
Some of the people I interact with on a regular base, at some point I like to get to know them better. The contributors on the board always did/do the same, some tell about their upcoming gigs, new CDs, animals, work etc. After the surface knowledge there is the urge to get some deeper insights. As this is a multi-cultural forum the subjects in question then can mutate to what I would call “juggling some hot cobble stones around” and we usually do not know beforehand what “top gets lifted from the pot” when we start asking questions about religion, ethics and morals nevertheless we have juggled them around here intensively on board and off board on all levels and some hard clashes on all levels have happened. Some of us got burned when outing themselves in giving basic statements and others by reading them. Both sides with a high possibility of being hurt by getting asked these questions in the first place or by reading the unexpected (but probably honest) answer. What one sends out as a protection the other can perceive it as aggression. This behaviour I think I have seen recently a lot on the board…. people asking, people answering, people replying, some misunderstanding, some hurt (maybe because they put a shoe on someone laid out for someone else which did not fit them). Sometimes during the long debates on threads I started wondering if some contributors really/still knew what started the thread and where the debate was coming from or leading to.
Well, a long message and most probably time to go and what did I really want to tell you? Well…? it took me two days each a few hours to get here. I could possibly carry on for another couple of days but thought you might like to go to bed at some point, I have to very soon now. I do not want nor can I present a formula for the board or something like this. I wrote just a few of the thoughts which have come up in the last weeks and did not let myself loose when following the threads. I thought best I let you know about it in the hope it might be something to chew on as well. There is no answer here, so probably I should not post it because of this? I will as I think it should not be wasted time only for my personal insight 
I have seen a lot of these long messages over the years written by lots of others C&Flers, never really realising how long it can take on “thin ice”. I now can even more appreciate their presence on the board and the personal time they took to contribute their knowledge. I have seen many many honest opinions about instruments, musicians and “god and the world” over the years and would not like to have missed them just because they might have had to be afraid that honesty is not wanted if the rest of the text is not 100% clear. In a hurry or hot debate one usually does not re-think every word as often as I did in my email and I still cannot be sure that “I did not step on someones foot”. In fast times we might need to re/act a little bit slower with a little bit more tolerance which comes automatically from a little bit more knowledge.
Wish you all a good night
Brigitte
edited as I was missing the smilies I had in my word text… good morning Brigitte
[ This Message was edited by: goldie on 2002-03-21 03:38 ]
