Frequently Asked Questions
regarding the jembe-list mailing list

What is the purpose of this FAQ?

The purpose of this Web document is specifically to help you with the mechanics of using the jembe-list. How to get on, how to get off, how to use the list most effectively. It is specifically not meant to house the answers to questions about jembe drumming. There are other resources for that which are maintained by folks who have saintlike patience. This is the place to come for answers to protocol questions and weenie technical questions and it is, appropriately, maintained by an irritable old weenie with few, if any, saintlike qualities.

What is the jembe-list?

The jembe-list is an Internet mailing list dedicated to furthering the study and appreciation of jembe traditions in Africa and abroad. It is supported as an educational endeavor by Wesleyan University through the good efforts of Wesleyan faculty member Eric Charry. Subscription is open to anyone willing to abide by the posting guidelines. Jembe-list is not moderated, but subscription to jembe-list is required for an individual to post to the list.

What do you mean by mailing list?

Well, here's how it works. There is a computer at Wesleyan University that is running a piece of commercial software called Lyris. You can think of Lyris as a robot who lives at Wesleyan and loves to facilitate the fruitful communication of far-flung folks by passing messages around for them. Lyris spends its days watching certain electronic mailboxes for messages that it needs to manage. One of those mailboxes is set aside for the jembe-list and has the Internet mail address of jembe-list@lyris.wesleyan.edu. Anyone who is subscribed to the list can send a message to that address and Lyris will automagically make copies of that message for each of the other subscribers and send them along. So from where you sit, really all you have to do to send a note to hundreds of other jembe enthusiasts is to send your message to jembe-list@lyris.wesleyan.edu.

Another important address that Lyris monitors is its own private box. Its address is lyris@lyris.wesleyan.edu and that is where you write to Lyris to say that you want to subscribe to jembe-list, unsubscribe from jembe-list, or change some details of your jembe-list subscription. All that will be revealed in excruciating detail below.

The important thing to remember is that the address that contains the name of the list, jembe-list, sends your message to lots and lots of folks and the one that contains Lyris's name is the one that you should use to manage your subscription. It is not a good thing to get these confused.

Lyris also provides a very nice Web interface to the jembe-list, accessible at http://lyris.wesleyan.edu/read/?forum=jembe-list. You can go there to do just about anything you can do through the e-mail interface including subscribe, unsubscribe, change things about your subscription, post a message, read messages and access the archives. Note that it is possible to use the jembe-list entirely through the Web interface and never receive any list traffic via e-mail. See the section below on reading and posting messages for more options.

A note to the list-savvy traveler: Lyris supports the commands and addresses of its major competitors as well as its own expanded set. So if you already know how to interact with LISTSERV or Majordomo, everything you know applies, including the standard commands and e-mail addresses.

The specific behavior of the jembe-list is determined by a combination of the many features of Lyris and a set of policy decisions made by the list administrators. Lyris is feature-rich and while there is a fair bit of list experience among the administrative team, none of the team has ever used Lyris before. If you find that some aspect of the mechanics of the list are interfering with fruitful use of the jembe-list, please let the administrators know. There is no guarantee that your particular needs will not be outweighed by other considerations, but rest assured that every effort will be made to accommodate reasonable requests.

What are the posting guidelines?

1. Please keep your topics related to the statement of purpose.
2. Subscribers run the gamut from novices to teachers and longtime students. Please be sensitive to their diversity of backgrounds. Many issues have been exhaustively discussed; see the links at the bottom of this page to other resources for further references.
3. Please consider carefully whether the reply you post is appropriate for the entire list OR should best be directed as private mail. Many posts (especially those of the "me too" variety) should be private rather than public posts.
4. Please keep your daily postings within a reasonable limit. You should read all of the postings in your mailbox before responding for several reasons: someone else may have already properly responded to a post; and a series of single posts from one person responding to a series of single posts can be quite annoying. Consider combining responses into a single post and using the subject header to broadcast the contents.
5. Please treat list members with courtesy and respect. Personal attacks, slurs, ridicule, and defamation are not tolerated. Subscribers are expected to conduct themselves in this forum according to basic standards of civilized exchange and discussion and to the general rules outlined by most Internet Service Providers.
6. The list administrator reserves the right to limit access to the list for anyone who repeatedly ignores the above guidelines. Gross abuses of list membership will result in your mail being blocked from reaching the list and your subscription being canceled.
7. Your continued subscription to this list is taken as acceptance of these guidelines and their consequences.

How do I subscribe to or unsubscribe from the list?

The easiest way to interact with the Lyris robot is through its Web interface at http://lyris.wesleyan.edu/read/?forum=jembe-list But if you'd rather use an old-fashioned e-mail interface, that is available as well and works as described below. In fairness to Lyris, what I have described here is only one of very many ways to communicate with the robot through e-mail. You can get the full gory details from the Lyris on-line manual.

To subscribe send e-mail to lyris@lyris.wesleyan.edu with a single line in the body of the message

In all of your mail to the Lyris robot the subject of your e-mail message is processed as if it were a line in the body of your message, so any one-line command can be specified in the subject if you prefer. Case (upper or lower) of commands is ignored so subscribe is equivalent to SUBSCRIBE or subSCRIBe. If your e-mail software automatically adds a signature to your outbound mail, you best turn that off or else the robot will try to interpret your signature as commands and maybe get confused. If you can't turn your signature off, add an additional line to your e-mail, at the end after the other command(s), containing the single word end which will instruct the robot to stop processing your message at that point.

Please note that subscription is a two-step process. When you request subscription through the Web interface or by e-mail, the Lyris robot will send you back a happy greeting message asking that you confirm your subscription. This is for your own protection, to make sure that the request came from you rather than someone pretending to be you. The message will contain a code in the subject line that is required for confirmation. The easiest thing to do in order to confirm your subscription is (for most mail agents) to just reply to the message and remove the contents of the body. When Lyris has processed your confirmation, you will receive an acknowledgement of that and an introductory message that contains valuable information that you might want to consider storing for future reference.

To unsubscribe, send a message to the same address, lyris@lyris.wesleyan.edu containing the single line

If either of these commands fails for some reason, you can send e-mail to the list administrators documenting your problem. Help should be forthcoming. Whatever you do, don't send a message to the whole list asking for help with your subscription. That is the e-quivalent of a prank telephone call and really annoys some people.

Are there other things I might want to change about my subscription?

Yes, a whole bunch. You can find out what there is to find out by sending an e-mail message to lyris@lyris.wesleyan.edu with a body that contains the single line

or by visiting the Web interface.

You can decide whether you receive copies of your own messages or just an acknowledgment, whether you receive messages as they are sent or in a periodic batch called a digest, etc. You can also receive just an index of the postings which you can use to access the postings through the Web. You can change your password, change the name Lyris knows you by, or change the address to which Lyris sends your mail. All kinds of cool stuff. Have a look at the Lyris on-line manual for more details.

Yes, I did say password. Lyris allows you to specify an optional password which protects you from someone making unauthorized changes to your subscription. The list administrators highly recommend that you use the password feature. If you forget your password, just get in touch with the list administrators and they'll help you out.

How many ways are there to read and post messages?

More than you might imagine. Lyris has three major interfaces and many variations on those.

Subscribers can interact with Lyris exactly as they would a more conventional list server such as Majordomo or LISTSERV. In that model all of your messages, coming and going, are passed as regular e-mail. To send a message, you send it to the Lyris robot. All messages to you are sent to your private mailbox. See the section below on posting messages. If you choose to receive messages by e-mail, you have the further option of receiving them as they are received by Lyris, in an occasional bundle called a digest, or simply as an index list of messages that you can use to access messages on the Web. See the next section for details.

Subscribed users may also send and read messages through the Lyris Web interface. Visitors may read but not post messages through the Web interface.

And of course you are free to mix and match. Makes your head spin, don't it?

Can I receive the list as a digest?

Yes. You can request this through the Web interface or by sending a message to the Lyris robot containing the single line

There are actually four modes in which you can receive messages: mail, digest, index and nomail. See the Lyris on-line manual for details.

How do I get my question answered by the list members?

First, check the list archives and other resources to see if your question has already been flogged to death on jembe-list or elsewhere. If your answer is not there, you can send your carefully-crafted e-mail message to jembe-list@lyris.wesleyan.edu Compose your message exactly as you would an article to appear in an international newspaper - remember that what you write will be sent immediately to hundreds of people all over the world and will be archived permanently in a way that will likely still be viewable by your great-grandkids when you are 98. Be brief, as specific as possible, and use a meaningful subject line. The subscribers are busy people just like you and do not want to be bothered with trivialities or pettiness. Please use the list responsibly.

You can also post a message through the Web interface.

Do I have to be subscribed to the list to ask a question?

Yes.

How come when I reply to a message my reply doesn't show up on the list?

Most likely your reply has gone only to the author of the message you replied to. The explanation of this behavior has two parts, one having to do with Internet standards and the other to do with policies set by the administrators of the jembe-list.

First a very brief tutorial on replies. Every Internet mail message has at the top a series of header lines, similar to the writing on the outside of a physical mail envelope, which contain important information about where the message is from, where it is going, where it has been, what it contains, etc. These header lines are in the form of a keyword followed by a colon (:) followed by a value. For instance, the subject line looks something like

Many modern mail agents hide most or all of these header lines from you, but rest assured they are there.

The rules that govern Internet mail (RFC 822, section 4.4.4) say that in forming the address for a reply to a message, mail agents should use the Reply-To: field, if it exists. If not, the From: field should be used.

That is the rule for forming the single address for responding to the sender, often identified as "Reply to sender" by mail agents. Most mail agents also have an option to "Reply to all" or something similar, which will construct the reply message so that it goes to the sender of the original, plus everyone the orginal was sent to.

The question of what the jembe-list server software puts into the Reply-To field has been difficult to resolve to everyone's satisfaction. The two obvious choices are to direct replies to the list or direct replies to the originator of the message being replied to. The first choice has the virtue that public conversations stay public by default. The downside, of course, is that it tends to increase the amount of private mail that accidentally gets sent to the list. The second choice reduces that risk, but at the price of somewhat stifling public debate.

The jembe-list currently does not alter the Reply-To field of the original message, and does not insert a Reply-To if there is not one in the original message. This is a provisional decision and subject to revision. The effect is that the default "Reply to sender" address is determined entirely by the headers of incoming messages. If the sender of a message does nothing unusual, the reply will go to the sender. If, as the originator of a message, you would like for your replies to go to the list (or somewhere else) you do have the choice of specifying your own Reply-To field which Lyris will not override.

When you reply to a list message, it is likely (though not certain) that using your "Reply to sender" will send your response privately back to the originator and "Reply to all" will send to the originator and to the list. In any case, you should always double-check the addresses on any outgoing mail to be sure you are sending it where you intend to.

Note that this discussion pertains only to replies generated by e-mail. The Web interface always replies to the list.

What are some common really annoying mistakes I should avoid?

One of the most common is to accidentally send private mail messages to the list. This may be a reply to something that appeared on the list, or it may be something unrelated. Always double check your outgoing message addresses before sending. Please also respect the fact that if someone sends you private mail you should not publish it to the list without their permission. Similarly, if something is posted to the list do not assume that you can reproduce it elsewhere without the author's formal consent.

When someone accidentally does send private mail to the whole list, resist the urge to send your own message to the whole list commenting on the fact that that person should not post private messages to the whole list. Please recognize that this or any other behavior intervention should be done privately if at all. Making a fuss in public just creates more noise and is ultimately as offensive as the original error.

Do not repeatedly post mail to the list demanding that everyone begin all their list messages with the phrase "the sound of one hand clapping" or some other arcanity because your e-mail reader requires that and you don't want to spend your precious time changing things on your end. It is practically impossible to get folks to voluntarily follow any convention rigidly enough for it to be useful in sorting mail. If you have software that can sort incoming mail, use something reliable like the Sender: field which is set consistently by the robot.

Please steadfastly resist the temptation to forward the latest virus warning or appeal for correspondence with a dying child that you just received as mass mail from one of your buddies. These things are always bogus. If a message contains an urgent request that you send it to as many people as possible then it is almost certainly a hoax. Please don't send it to the list. Please, please, pretty please.

Those warning messages about viruses that will bring down your system if you open e-mail with a certain subject are particularly clever. You see, the message is the virus and it propagates itself by exploiting your need to be a hero. It is not possible to propagate a virus simply by reading the plain text of an e-mail message. But, if you react to the message by sending it to everyone you know then you become the agent of the propagation. Your outbound mail is the "virus" in action.

Please don't send your messages as attachments that can only be read using proprietary software that only runs on one brand of computer. This becomes particularly offensive if the illegible attachments are really big or if they cause certain mail agents to choke. The effect is enhanced if there is no clue in the plaintext as to what the attachment might be about.

If you would like to share a photo or large document with everyone, please don't send it as an attachment. This is discourteous to folks who are on slow dial-up links and/or who do not have the facilities to decode and display what you have attached. The thing to do is to put the material on a Web site and send the URL only to the list.

May I make a commercial announcement on the list?

In general, brief, factual announcements of new products and services are welcome, as are authoritative answers as to whether a specific product can or cannot do a specific thing. Announcements of events such as concerts and workshops are also welcome, though you are encouraged to mention the locale in the subject line. Pimping is not welcome. As a rule of thumb anything that would be appropriate in a factual newspaper article is certainly OK but windy or repeated advertisements are certainly not OK. You can use links to your own Web pages for publishing details.

How do I access the list archives?

The archives are viewable through the Lyris Web interface. You do not need to be a list subscriber to view the archives.

Who owns the contents of the list and its archives?

Ultimately, that question can only be decided by the courts in particular cases, but there is broad agreement that making a contribution to the jembe-list is identical to submitting work for publication in a conventional medium. In that setting, it is usually the case that ownership of the material (its copyright) remains with the original author unless the author makes specific other explicit assignment(s).

In accordance with that interpretation of international copyright law, materials submitted to the jembe-list should be considered to be and remain the property of the original author and should only be reproduced with express written permission of the author. Reproduction of excerpts, such as quotes in a replying message, are permissible if done in accordance with the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Authors who wish to place their work in the public domain may do so by including a statement to that effect in their postings. Authors should understand that submission of their work to the jembe-list constitutes a request for the material to be distributed to all subscribers at the time of submission, as well as a request for the material to be placed in the list archives where the material will remain publically accessible for the forseeable future.

Why jembe rather than djembe?

There is a rather significant problem with determining the "correct" English spelling of words like jembe and dunun because the languages from which these words originate are historically oral languages with no indigenous written expression. Ethnomusicologists, as well as many African governments, nowadays tend toward phonetic transliterations of such languages. The d in the widely-used spelling djembe is an artifact of French transliteration. In German writing some have used the spelling jenbe. There is no agreed-upon correct English spelling, but jembe is phonetically pretty close.

Where can I find information about jembe drumming and Mande culture?

• Eric Charry's Guide to the Jembe article
• Eric Charry's African Music index
• The drumming FAQ maintained by Happy Shel
• Djembe and Mande Music Resource and Reference Page

What other links should go here?