Hi Lodewijk,

I want to encourage people to feel comfortable with posting in-scope and civil emails to WMF mailing lists, but my personal opinion is that the number of reminders is sometimes excessive and the related costs are non-trivial.

My view is that excessive reminders about meetings have recently been especially afflicting Wikitech-l, but have also taken place on Wikimedia-l periodically.

If we multiply the quantity of seconds that the average person spends clicking or scanning through a reminder email by (1) the number of recipients and (2) the average hourly value of recipients' time, I don't know what the total costs (in money and time) would be but I think that they would be non-trivial.

I think that I'm being reasonable in requesting that people make announcements about most one-time meetings 14 days in advance.

However, I seem to be a minority of one. And speaking of time management, my guess is that there are hundreds or thousands of other busy people on these mailing lists who might not appreciate my continuing to press this subject, so I'm moving on.

Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

On Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 11:34 PM effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Pine,

I would also suggest not to get overly bureaucratic with this :) If the public meeting you refer to requires a large attendance, the 14 days makes sense for example - but I cannot recall many meetings of that style. Rather, most meetings are either scheduled taking the availability of participants in mind, or it is to get input (where it is more important to have a bunch of people show up, than to have everyone participate).

Whether more than one reminder is excessive, is imho quite subjective. I appreciate most reminders, especially if they stick to the same thread.

On a side note: are there any weekly meetings being announced on this list? Again, it highly depends on the topic, and whether the reminder may also contain more information.

My point? Don't worry about it so much :) Be flexible with this, and go with the flow. People can figure this out quite well if they use their common sense without added bureaucracy.

Lodewijk