[Foundation-l] Proposal: foundation-announce-l

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Benjamin Lees<emufarmers at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>> I propose the foundation-announce-l mailing list be set up with the
>> following posting rules:
>> 1) One post per person per thread.  That includes the initiator of the
>> thread.
>
> That's not how announcement lists work.  The whole point of an announcement
> list is that the only posts on it will be announcements; and for the list to
> be useful, the announcements have to be limited to those that are important
> to the list's topic (which is usually narrowly defined) and of interest to
> the subscribers—which generally means that only people in positions of
> authority are allowed to post.  mediawiki-announce and toolserver-announce
> are good examples.

I'm pretty confident that Anthony knows how traditional announcement
lists work.  But what is the meaning of an announcement list for a
non-hierarchical highly decentralized project?   For smaller projects
you just give all the active project members the rights to post to the
list — and trust that they understand that they are supposed to keep
the volume down and that all the project members agree about what is
announcement worthy.

I think what Anthony suggests is an interesting and worthwhile idea.
The Wikimedia communit(y|(ies)) have a lot of communications
challenges: People are often unaware of interesting things that others
are doing. The editorial channels like EnWP's signpost are fairly
narrow pipe. And the open communication lists suffer from high traffic
even when their signal to noise ratio is decent.

I don't agree with the notion that "we need moderators and list admins
to make sure the
rules are not broken", obviously the list would need someone who can
enforce the rules but there is little reason to believe that there
would be much enforcement work after all: the wikis do okay without
heavy handed control.

Right now there is a lot of announcement duplication because there is
no clearly right place to send announcements with foundation wide
impact, so we send them everywhere.

Were I king of the universe I'd probably pick somewhat different
criteria than Anthony suggested (i.e. I might suggest something crazy
like initial posts must be translated into at least two languages… to
shift the communication cost onto the sender; or require that any
posting be on behalf of at least two people), but I don't know that
the specifics matter or that my suggestions would really be any better
than his.

If someone wants to try out something along the lines of what Anthony
is suggesting I'd be willing to volunteer for list-mod duty, with the
understanding that the moderators purpose is primary enforcing the
rules for traffic control purposes.