[Tig] friendly reminder (disclaimers and marketing)

[Rob Lingelbach]

Just wanted to insert a friendly reminder that discussions of
equipment and their merits are most welcome but if you're promoting
a product, please disclaim your financial interest in the company or
product at the end of your message.   The reasons for this are
stated in the following text which is available on the wiki at
http://tig.colorist.org/wiki3/index.php/Notes_on_TIG_Advertising

Notes on TIG Advertising  (March, 2007)
This is lifted directly from a message to the main TIG mailinglist,
to be found also in the archives.
There has been some renewed confusion on the TIG regarding the
policies on advertising/marketing. This question comes up
periodically and is worth revisiting.
Manufacturers and vendors have participated in the TIG since shortly
after it started in 1992. It was, at that time, a controversial
change to allow them in, as it tended to stifle the exchanges we had
been having in complaining about equipment. But the consensus was
that the benefits were worth it, and this has been proved. If one
looks at the way Usenet functions (Usenet being a distributed
conferencing system similar to the TIG and TIG/wiki), the
professional groups have not allowed advertising and by
self-policing or in some cases moderation insisted that a post that
gives seemingly self-serving advice be disclaimed such that the
author is not financially connected directly with the products or
services being offered. Another example of an unbiased network is
the Public Broadcasting System in the US, which keeps advertising
limited to simple statements, such as what the main TIG mailinglist
includes at the top of every message, the "contributor's credit."
In 1995 or so, we (the group) decided to allow advertising but not
on the main mailinglist, instead on a separate "tig-announce" digest
that would be sent out to all TIG subscribers separately, so they
could keep a division in their mail between marketing and the main,
original, information-based list. This has worked well over the
years but has perhaps been underused. The only requirement for
participation by a manufacturer/vendor in the tig-announce digest is
a contribution to the TIG, and this contribution has no strict lower
limit, and can be scaled to work with budgets. This is a difference
between some other internet-based groups and the TIG.
A couple of years after the tig-announce digest was started, we
created a wiki, (originally it ran TWiki software) which has gone
through three main iterations. The wiki can be used by any
registered user as a "pull" type of mechanism (as opposed to the TIG
mailinglist's "push" model) so large files, images, commercial
announcements, etc. can be web-based. It was originally thought that
this might replace the mailinglist, but email remains the primary
means of communication on the net, though as a primary it has been
diluted significantly by spam. Spam has in its turn spawned antispam
software which is an industry in its own right; if one thinks
seriously about this it becomes clear that the antispam industry
depends on the proliferation of spam for its income, so the two are
in a sycophantic relationship, or have an inherently strong mutual
interest. The same is true of viruses and anti-virus software...
I mention the spam/virus factor to illustrate why the TIG tries to
keep its main mailinglist commercial-free, and to use the annexed
tig-announce mailinglist for commercial/marketing posts.
Private, individual "For Sale," "Wanted," "Jobs Offered," and
"Positions Desired" postings are accepted on an individual basis,
and go out to the main list, sometimes after a contribution (in the
case of For Sale ads) but often not (in the other cases). These are
distinct private-party classifieds. The example of newspapers'
classifieds sections is appropriate here; in the USA, private party
ads come under different rules than those from dealers and
manufacturers.
The last point is perhaps the most important: when a subscriber to
the TIG needs information from a manufacturer, or help, or input of
any kind, the manufacturer has two choices in how to respond:
privately, or publicly on the mailinglist. Private responses are not
in any way regulated by TIG rules. Public list-based responses are
regulated by these simple rules: marketing is not allowed, in the
sense of statements something like "See what we're offering this
year at booth xxxx we have just what you're looking for" and
personal abuse is not allowed. These rules are designed to keep the
integrity of the TIG as high as possible, given that we're all human
and make mistakes.. a further standards-based TIG etiquette guide is
available at
http://tig.colorist.org/wiki3/index.php/Guide_to_TIG_Etiquette

Another analogy to how the TIG works can be found in the publishing
of magazines. There exist magazines such as the SMPTE journal, and
magazines such as Film and Video (it does still exist?). The former
is commercial-free, the latter sometimes (often) functions as a PR
organ for companies and vendors. Both are valuable, but the TIG fits
somewhere between and closer to the SMPTE model, in shunting any
marketing over to its supplemental tig- announce section.
--Rob Lingelbach 20:12, 21 March 2007 (PDT)

Rob Lingelbach  rob at colorist.org
http://www.colorist.org/robhome.html