OBA-Net: Boring Name, Great Site
By Jim Drummond

Names of Web sites are so e-descriptive. How e-dull! It’s like finding yourself in the huge basement of an e-department store when you don’t really e-want to buy anything, but every item is labeled with a big redundant e-sign. Socks.com. Shirts.com. Duh.com!

At first blush, www.oba-net.org also seems dully descriptive — it’s the forum Web site of the OBA, which might more intriguingly stand for the Oddly Boring Articulator or the Obnoxiously Bad Attitude or the Okmulgee Beekeepers’ Apiary. Does the site name reach out and grab you, does it compel you to revisit that Web site every single day, as often as once every 10 minutes?

Yep. Right now — after registering for free at www.oba-net.org — you will find yourself on a site that has more than 9,000 “new” messages. Every weekday you can hit “today’s messages” or “yesterday’s messages,” and you may find 50-150 posted messages on every topic under the sun, whether legal, political or humorous, and as varied as the geometry of snowflakes.

Sometimes the conversation is didactic — lawyers asking and answering questions posed under the menu headings of criminal law, intellectual property law and 20 other specified areas, including “other areas of law.” OBA-NET is a major e-mentor. OBA-NET lawyers are incredibly generous with their expertise and time, and there are no dumb questions — despite the popularity of “Dumb Question” as a subject heading.

Other topics include “Chewing the Fat,” “Current Issues” and “Humor – Off the Record” that are areas of the site I often refer to collectively as the Quarantine, or as the land of Caveat Emptor. You enter these sites at your own risk. Expect the controversial, or even the borderline outrageous. Leave the thin skin at home, although in fact the debate is usually courteous. If someone crosses the line into the overly risqué – or perhaps the offensive or misogynist — quickly a Greek chorus of OBA-Netters verbally flagellates the offender with not quite the most silken of whips.

Okay, these are contrived flourishes of language. Nolo contendere. I love the rhetoric of
politics and adversarial discourse with a passion, but some estimable OBA-Netters are revolted by it, which means they stay away from this quarantined area. You can find anything you want in this market of ideas and avoid anything you do not want. It is very much like the Greek agora — meaning marketplace. If I were given the chance to
re-christen the OBA-NET with a less obvious name, I would perhaps choose www.lawagora.pro.

The OBA-NET is the finest forum of ideas and quality interactions I have ever encountered. It is not an addiction, because that implies a self-destructive activity. I have made friends on this site with whom I disagree on absolutely every political issue, and yet I regard them as among my good friends. Some I have never seen face to face; others are concealed behind various photographic and imaginative “avatars”—
photographic alter egos.

Often the quality of humor and debate is superb; sometimes not. Such is the marketplace. The debate can be a No Man’s Land, with Sheriff Jim “Wyatt Earp” Calloway simply ensuring that you check your guns in the sheriff’s office. Sometimes it resembles a mosh pit replete with body slams and discordant epithets hurled like rotten tomatoes, and sometimes it is a refined dialogue worthy of Socrates’ Symposium.

You can never be sure what you will encounter, but it is frequently stimulating, hilarious, and provocative by turns. If I were marooned on a desert island, I would not trade it for any other Web site.

FYI: For more details about OBA online services, check out www.okbar.org/members/map/articles/online.htm.

Mr. Drummond works for the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System in Norman.