Re: [Fsfe-uk] [Proposal] Mailing lists

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 13:55, address@hidden wrote:
> I am told she was talking about receiving posts twice when they do get
> crossposted. Anyhow this list is currently has a very high noise ratio and I
> have found that I am not reading much of it in depth anymore due to what I
> perceive as a large amount of utterly useless "chatter". (my opinion only that
> second sentence)
> <snip>
> > There's not much else happening.  Perhaps everyone else has left the
> > list <g>...
> 
> Kirsty unsubscribed shortly after sending that message... We have already lost
> many subscribers or people have stopped reading this list due to the low 
> amount
> of communication on free software and the amount of posts with no real content
> in them. (again my opinion only, not statement of fact)

If we're going to fix this we have to make a really good attempt at
doing it right.

I still don't believe splitting the list will do any good in and of
itself. I'm not really sure what makes this list mostly 'noise' - I know
discussions do get too technical and pedantic. But, this doesn't appear
to me to be a general topicality issue. I have always agreed that
procedural stuff shouldn't be here, but I don't actually see that there
is much procedural stuff here at all anyway. It also seems to me that we
cannot do anything about volume particularly, except putting in place a
real affs-announce functioning almost as a newswire, which is something
we keep threatening to do. It's been said that this list is both too
high volume and low volume. 

There are probably too few regular posters. There is probably too little
detail and too much detail, in equal measure. I think the discussion
about member lists and subscription is something of a red herring; we
already have that. 

I don't particularly like the idea of an affs-rules or affs-procedure. I
think that will be exclusionary. But, I dislike even more the idea of
taking general free software discussion off this list with something
like affs-discuss. I like the idea of affs-activity now I've just
thought of it. The split between fsfe-uk/affs-activity being more akin
theory/practice rather than free software/affs (which seems an arbitrary
line to me). 

I think a question that may have to be addressed is one of list culture.
fsfe-uk has been unfriendly in the past. affs-anything has the potential
to be naval gazing in the extreme. That's not something we have the
potential to change, except by bringing in lots of new people. 

Cheers,

Alex.