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On behalf of the Institute of General Semantics, I would like to welcome everyone to our new Discussion Forums. We respect all of the time and energy that participants put into their posts on our old message boards, so we have made it a priority to save their contents and make them available in archival form on our new website.
The introduction of our new Forum area also means that we have been given a fresh start, and we hope you will take this opportunity to continue to engage in intellectual discussion, in dialog and debate, in the sharing of ideas and perspectives, and in maintaining a high level of discourse. And of course we also ask that your participation be civil, exhibiting respect for other participants, and that you endeavor to adhere, to the best of your ability, to the principles of general semantics in your posts to these forums.
In comparison to the old message boards, you will no doubt notice many new features, and have a chance to experiment with them and, we hope, have fun with them. There also will be unfamiliar elements, and perhaps some frustration, as that often accompanies change, so we ask for your patience, and we will all have to help each other familiarize ourselves with this new system.
Given a fresh start, we have made a few changes to the set-up that we hope will be improvements. On the administrative level, we now begin with three forums devoted to Announcements, one for announcements concerning the message boards, one for official announcements from the Institute of General Semantics, and a third forum that anyone can contribute to, specifically for other announcements such as calls for papers and information about events. We also have two Help forums, one devoted to the message boards, and one more generally concerning the website. And on behalf of the IGS, I want to thank Ben Hauck for taking on the role of Web Master as well as Moderator for our new Discussion Forums (I will serve as a back-up should Ben be unavailable for any significant period of time).
We have also set up a section named About General Semantics which includes two forums. The first, General Semantics for Beginners, we intend as a forum where anyone can ask a question, no matter how basic, and not feel embarrassed or intimidated, and have the question answered by a representative of the Institute. We have devoted the second forum to the topic of teaching, where individuals can share strategies, techniques, curricula, exercises, etc., and ask for advice.
And we have a section entitled Advanced Discussion that we want to make available for open and wide-ranging interaction. In this section, we have retained two forums from the old boards, one devoted to news items, and one for discussions related to a specific book, such as Science and Sanity. And we have introduced The Agora as a general forum where discussion on any topic can be initiated and carried on in a free and open manner.
We have decided not to set up other forums devoted to specific topics and then ask participants to make sure they choose the appropriate forum for their topic, as this would come across as too Aristotelian (and authoritarian) for our tastes, encouraging a two-valued orientation (not to mention the danger of the hardening of the categories). Also, participants tend to gravitate to the same board and turn it into a general, miscellaneous forum even if no such forum is provided (as was the case with the Learning GS forum on the old boards), so we think it best to set up The Agora as a general purpose forum up front.
As threads accumulate in The Agora, we will want to create some form of order and organization based on the specific topics that participants introduce. To that end, we will go back over the threads at a later date and group them together as seems appropriate, and create new forums based on the actual discussions that have taken place here. In this way, we plan to use a bottom-up approach to organization rather than a more traditional top-down method, as a nonhierarchical orientation is in keeping with the bias of online media, and of general semantics itself.
And with that, I want to conclude by saying, thank you for your patience and understanding, for your interest and your time, and for your participation.
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