social software in hard copy (was: Clay Shirky on social software

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Tim Regan" <timregan at m...> 
wrote:
> 
> Catlady – do you have references to any of these? In particular how 
> did M2Ms work – who kept the membership list and how did it scale? 
> What are APAs? How ancient is a Round Robin Manuscript, and how is 
> membership maintained for them? Again, nobody expects the Spanish 
> Inquisition.

Sounds like you had a lovely holiday.
I never came closer to a publication that called itself an M2M than 
reading their listings in the late lamented Factsheet Five, but Mike 
Gunderloy confirmed that they're the same as APAs, which have been 
part of my life for upwards of 25 years.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/APA
"In science fiction fandom an APA is a periodically collated 
fanzine (or specifically apazine) for which the pages are printed by 
each contributor on his own, and then sent to be collated and 
redistributed solely to the contributors themselves. (Derives from 
Amateur Press Association)"

Almost right. Each individual's contribution is called a fanzine or 
apazine, not the entire pile of contribution (which is called various 
things like 'bundle' and 'distribution'). Often the members send only 
one copy (the 'original') to the central person (often called titles 
like Central Mailer or Official Editor even tho' heesh does no 
editting), and the central person reproduces them at the member's 
expense -- when I was CM of an APA, I just took everything to a 
photocopy shop, but serious fans used to have their own mimeographs 
at home and they demanded that originals be sent typed on mimeo 
stencils until electrostencilling (a way of photocopying something 
onto a stencil) became widely available.

The Central Mailer collates all the copies of the disty (one copy 
of each contribution to each disty) and usually adds a Table of 
Contents, a cover, and staples. My domestic partner, Tim, is OE of 
APA-L, a weekly apa approaching disty number 2000, which is 
collated each week during the meeting of the Los Angeles Science 
Fantasy Society. He hands the disties out in person to any member 
who stayed late enough for the collation to be finished. The APA of 
which I was CM was monthly and had members all over, so I mailed the 
disties to the members (thus, another name for disty is 'mailing'). 
Many APAs charge dues to pay for the ToC, cover, and staples 
--- I just paid for them myself --- APA-L sells surplus disties to 
raise money to pay for that stuff. The members pay for the cost of 
postage to mail it to them.

In general, the Central Mailer keeps the membership list. In general, 
the only officier is the Central Mailer, the first Central Mailer is 
the founder of the APA, and when a Central Mailer is sick of the job, 
heesh calls an election with votes due in by a certain date. Often, 
we're lucky if there is even one candidate. (APAs are dying out as 
people switch to the immediate gratification of on-line groups 
instead, as I have done.) Some of the older APAs have more elaborate 
structures, with a President and a Treasurer and the responsibility 
of being Central Mailer rotates in order among the members.

Problems of scale are avoided by specifying how many members the 
APA can have at one time, and having a waiting list if people want to 
join but the roster is full. There was a time when SFPA (Southern 
Fandom Press Association) was so popular that people on the waiting 
list started their own APA, Shadow-SFPA, and they had to limit it 
to the top 30 people on the waiting list, so the next 30 people 
plotted to found Shadow-Shadow-SFPA.

I didn't say it was a useful model for on-line communication, just 
that it had existed!

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=round+robin&go=Go
"The term round-robin is used in several contexts and usually means 
that a number of things are taking turns at something, for example a 
"round-robin-party" where participants walk door to door for small 
parties at each participants habitat." 

I don't know much of the history. I know that my friends in middle 
school and I had a round robin in a spiral notebook that we passed to 
each other in alphabetic order, wrote what we wanted to, and passed 
on. I know that a Mystery Novel was written in that manner (but not 
with comments scrawled on the previous papges) by a collection of 
prominent Mystery Writers in 1942 and evidentally published as "The 
President's Mystery Novel".