Interfaced!

In clothing construction, the interfacing is a piece of special fabric that goes in between the outside and the inside fabrics in order to stiffen slightly a particular part of the garment. So, for example, a collar or a lapel will have interfacing in the middle, attached in some way to both inside and outside fabrics usually, so as to emphasize the shape of the collar or lapel as well as to give it a little more body and make it able to resist wear better. I mention this because there is an email list on the Point called ‘Point-Interface,’ and it is an inspired name, because it does exactly what an interfacing does for an item of clothing. It gives Point Roberts a little more shape, a little more cohesiveness, and in the long run will make Point Roberts wear better, I think.

The person who presides over Point-Interface does so somewhat by accident, as I understand the history. It started as a list for the Red Hat Group, and then over time, other names were added and now it has several hundred names. Anyone can ask to be added to the list and if you do you will get maybe 8 emails a week with a remarkable range of information. Perhaps you would like to buy a lovely carpet that someone on the other side of the Point needs to have out of their house; join a group that is coordinating neighbors who are able to provide one another occasional transport to the airport; locate your missing cat or your missing drill; rescue a pet whose owner is not findable; be told about the latest gallery show at The Blue Heron or a concert on Sunday at the Lutheran Church; be reminded of the meeting (and the meeting's agenda) of the Taxpayers or the Voters Associations; or hear about a new book of poetry that a resident has published; or be brought up to date on a new transit program that Whatcom County is offering to those of us on the Point. It’s a wondrous grab bag of emails, some of which I file away, some of which I delete, all of which I am glad to have seen and know about, even if I don’t respond specifically to them. It's a little like a tiny, kind-of-daily newspaper.

Last year, when I thought that the Point Roberts Community Association might reasonably have a website , I thought that such a mode of communicating might be a feature of that website, but I didn’t know then about Point-Interface. And I suspect that eight months ago, it didn't have as wide-ranging a series of community announcements and information as it now has. Currently, the list-keeper has a large enough base of people interested so that Point-Interface has enormous potential for providing community cohesion without anybody having to attend meetings or be made the president.

The key to making this all work, I suspect, is that the person who runs the list has only two main jobs: One, maintaining the list of email addresses, and, second, receiving information and making a judgment as to whether any particular request should go out to everyone on the list. All replies come back to the person who wants the information posted. So, if you want to locate your missing cat, you send the information and a picture to the list keeper, and your message with your reply information then goes out to the list. If you want to engage the help of others, point-interface is a great place to start. I'm working out the possibility of starting a hand sewing/embroidery class for kids on the Point, and once I get the preliminaries worked out, the point-interface list is where I'll go to find out if there actually are any kids interested in learning hand sewing/embroidery. There's simply no other way I could effectively get that information. Great thanks to the list keeper! By contrast, if you want to fulminate about Obama, or the Whatcom Council, the All Point Bulletin's Letters to the Editor is the place for that information.

If you want to be added to the point-interface list, send your name, phone number, and email address to point-interface@pointroberts.net. Try it, trying being a part of the connected part of the Point.