[EM] July for Electorama! (and figuring out EPOV)

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi everyone!

As some of you might have heard, C4ES is shutting down
forum.electionscience.org (see
https://forum.electionscience.org/t/archiving-the-forum-july-30th/697
for details).  That makes me sad, because it was a more active venue
than this mailing list.  This ratchets the pressure back up on me to
find a better mailing list solution than Dreamhost's Mailman 2.x
(which probably isn't getting ported to Python3 anytime soon).

I was actually starting to like using the forum software that C4ES has
been use (Discourse.org), and I'm going to miss being able to send
plain-text messages while still being able to use **bold** and
_italic_ without interspersing my plain text with funky punctuation.
But alas, C4ES doesn't want to moderate the forums anymore.

This mailing list has always been my personal litmus test for EPOV
(Electorama Point of View).  Over the past year, I've been calling it
"EPOV" (for "electowiki POV"), but that sells y'all short.  Who do I
mean by "y'all"?  I mean the loyal subscribers of the EM-list, some of
whom have been here since 1996.  We're about to have the 25th
anniversary of EM-list, so I want to make sure that you all are part
of the discussion as we define what "EPOV" is.

"EPOV" is currently defined here:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Electowiki:EPOV

You'll notice that the EM-list's perspective seems to have been
watered down relative toother forums (e.g. the C4ES forum, or
/r/EndFPTP over on reddit).  I *was* thinking about asking y'all to
join me in the big migration over to the C4ES Discourse.org server,
but since that's shutting down, that won't work at all.

I have a lot of ideas about how we should modernize our discussions.
It seems to me that with lots of CGP Grey videos and plenty of
discussion forums out in the world, the last thing that any of us
should be doing is building a new piece of forum software. Moreover,
there are many complicated reasons why

The best place to stay on top of things is on my electowiki journal,
available here:
<https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa/Journal>

I'm going to try to keep that space up-to-date.  You can also follow
me on my Miraheze wiki:
<https://robla.miraheze.org/wiki/RobLa_journal>

Yeah, I did set up a wiki all about me.  What are you going to do
about it?  :-P (other than set up a wiki all about you)

Rob
p.s. if you hunt around enough, you can find the new Electorama! Quora
"space", and other sites where I'm testing out their discussion
capabilities

p.p.s. I'm almost always camped out on C4ES's Discord server.  Discord
and Discourse are completely different software, and not to be
confused.  I'm *reasonably* sure that C4ES doesn't intend to shut down
the Discord server, too: https://electionscience.org/discord

p.p.p.s.  I'm documenting the Discourse dialog here:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Project:C4ES_discourse.org_server