[cc-community] email volume: critical
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Wed Nov 21 01:51:43 EST 2007
Alek Tarkowski wrote:
> Is it just me, or are some discussions getting out of control and have
> little to do with a "community" mailing list?
You've made this complaint before. But what exactly do you think a
"community" list is for?
ISTM, that this is precisely its function, and thus I am happy with the
way things are. You may see these topics as repetitive, but I see them
as refining arguments and defining useful conceptual boundaries. This
may not seem like progress to you, but to me it does.
Each time a new event challenges our conceptions, we have a chance to
re-examine those conceptions.
If you want to compile a current state-of-the-art of your
pre-conceptions, then you use a wiki. That's a useful thing. But a
discussion list is meant to be dynamic and to test these points. It has
been quite effective as an instrument for many other communities in the
past.
If you want not to be so involved in a community discussion, then that's
fine with me. If CC thinks this isn't the place to have these
discussions, then that's fine too, as long as there exists such a place.
But this is precisely where we have been directed to go -- in fact, as
drew points out, many of these discussions were on the cc-licenses list,
as they do in many cases touch on legal issues (CC is defined by a set
of legal instruments, after all).
So as far as I am concerned, this IS the designated place for these
kinds of discussions.
> I was really interested in the recent "RCRD LBL" thread for example, but
> gave up after the first dozen of posts. Especially that these are not
> normal mails, but crazy tangles of quotes, comments, re-quotes and
> re-comments. Appearing by a dozen on a single day.
>
> I know pointing fingers is not nice, but drew Roberts himself wrote over
> 30 emails in less then a week, including 10 emails on an especially
> fruitful 19th of November and 3 emails in the last hour and a half.
> That's shocking.
Is it? Maybe your email client is a problem. This situation is not so
hard to manage with a properly threaded client.
There is also a small search engine built into Thunderbird which makes
searching for old messages much simpler. Other clients have similar
features.
In any case, this is *hardly* the most unmanageable list I'm on. Traffic
here is extremely light and very much on topic. This is nothing like as
complicated as a typical mailing list for a programming language
community, for example.
> Maybe we could have two threads, labelled appropriately in the subject
> area - (slow / fast? normal / crazy?). And then people with time to
> write 10 emails a day could hopefully provided minutes of the crazy
> track to the rest of us.
I personally would far rather have separate emails on separate topics
than to have everything mashed into a few emails. I believe this is the
convention that is being followed in these discussions. This has been
viewed as the most considerate practice since the 1980s when discussions
like this were generally held via usenet newsgroups.
It sounds like the real problem is that you are trying to read the list
linearly -- which is the wrong way to read a mailing list! It's no
wonder you get lost if that's what you're trying to do.
> Furthermore, it's sort of strange to see, for example, the issue of
> attribution in CC licenses discussed once again (19 mails in three
> days!).
There are always new questions, and the responses are not the same.
> Maybe we should have some sort of a volunteer run advice clinic
> for queries like this - you pop a question into a queue and one - or
> several, for good measure and a balanced out response
That would work beautifully if there were a strong consensus, but often
there isn't, even with "Attribution". "Non-commercial" is a positive
nightmare.
> - volunteers picks
> the subject out and communicates with you personally. A mini - case
> study could be provided as an end result, to the benefit of others, so
> that with time you just point people to the right case.
I agree that that's a good project for the wiki. Are you volunteering to
do the work? Many people are quick to propose ideas, but few volunteer
to implement them. That's been the way of community enterprises for
pretty much all of Human history, AFAIK. :-)
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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