I'm not sure what thread these comments would thread best in to, but I'm just going to put them here since it's the most recent one. I'm not intending this as a direct reply to anyone, just some thoughts about this series of threads.
Content-wise... I think the appropriate scope of this list is anything related to the gender gap on Wikimedia projects, broadly construed. I think this can and should include such things as discussion of outreach methods, discussion of high level ideas about how to help address the gap, discussion of research (like Joseph Reagle's recent study) about what the gap actually is and what problems it causes, discussion of people's experiences on the projects, offering support to people who have had negative experiences, and discussion of particular problems on any project that are related to/caused by/exacerbated by the gender gap. I don't see any particular reason to constrain the scope beyond that, and I don't think anyone has offered one. If someone does have a good reason to constraint the scope of the list beyond that, please share it.
Regarding language-specific content: I can understand why it would be frustrating for people from non-EN communities to repeatedly see people discuss EN project contents, but I think the solution to this is not to avoid talking about EN contents, but to encourage people who speak other languages to start talking about content from other language communities. The discussion of EN specific contents has generated tangible, important results. I do not understand why limiting the discussion of anything that has directly generated results that has/will positively impact the gendergap could possibly be a good thing. I would discuss non-EN things myself, but I don't speak any other language well enough to understand their communities enough to do so. I will be ecstatic if people from other communities start sharing their observations here. I mean I will literally be ecstatic. If anyone is in the SF bay area, we can meet up and I will buy you a beer and dance a jig to show exactly how ecstatic I mean. In physical outreach settings I am frequently asked about the gap's effects on non-EN projects, and never know enough to answer questions well.
Traffic-wise since it's been brought up a bit: I don't think that this is a high enough traffic list to be worth worrying about the small amount of added load that messages like Sarah's cause. In November, this list had ~84 messages. That's really pretty low. In comparison, F-L had 427, India-L had 512, and WLM had 105. If anyone honestly has trouble with the amount of email on this list, I would suggest either using rules in your mail client to shunt all gendergap messages off to a subfolder that you can read at your leisure, or changing to a daily digest (which would cap list traffic at ~30 messages a month.) If anyone needs a hand with either of these, shoot me a message off-list and I'll help you through it.
Behavior-wise... this has not been Foundation-L in the past, and I've been very glad of that. Some of the comments in this thread have been a lot closer to things you would see on F-L than to things you've traditionally seen here. I would hope that other subscribers agree with me that this list should not become F-L like. I think that it is important that this list serve as a safe space for discussion, and think that if someone repeatedly makes other people feel like it's not they should be moderated*, even if their behavior doesn't stoop to the level that would normally be considered blockworthy on any of the projects.
*For those unfamiliar, this would mean that any messages they send to the list would be held for approval by a moderator before being delivered to the general list, so that any inappropriate ones could be discarded.
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Kevin Gorman
User:Kgorman-ucb