Discuss mailing list

[Quinn Wood <wood.quinn.s AT gmail.com>]

On 12/04/2012 03:19 PM, Jamyn Shanley wrote:
> The vast majority of OpenNIC information could (should?) be put on the
> website, and not a wiki.
I think it's important to make the distinction between a few forms of 
communication. I was talking with a few folks about this last night on IRC.

A website should be the gateway from the WWW to your community or 
project. It doesn't need to be updated frequently, because all specific 
and technical information it contains can reside on a wiki, and should 
if you have one. It should be focused more on introducing non-technical 
or uneducated (in the facets of your community/issues you are trying to 
solve through the project) than presenting facts. A website is a very 
good place to communicate announcements, but when you have a mailing 
list that can be more appropriate.

A wiki should be used when you want to allow collaborative editing of 
informational articles. Without commitment or responsibility being 
affixed to any given article outside what a contributor wants to give. 
This is where factual and statistical stuff goes. The fact that it's 
collaboratively edit...able? means the information is theoretically more 
likely to be kept up to date with less work by individual contributors.

Groupware should be used when you want to accomplish specific things; 
discrete amounts of work. This includes things like document and file 
sharing, task lists, and calendars. It can also include code hosting, 
but with all the available platforms they'd probably be more suited to 
those projects that need them, like the API or WHOIS code.

IRC is what it is, an instant discussion forum. It's very functional for 
meetings or uncontroversial votes, but since there's already a practice 
of using the mailing list for those, that's ok too.

Mailing lists, as mentioned above, are great for announcements. It's 
important not to flood all lists with news from third party sources and 
other things which don't need immediate action. That's great for the 
discuss list, but if we had an announce list, it wouldn't be wanted there.

Lastly, these are all ideally combined and intertwined in whatever way 
works best for people, that way you don't have to have three tabs open 
in a browser, a subscription to seven mailinglists, and four IRC 
channels open in a client just to be in the know :)

My $0.0214 (does not include S&H.)

Not all of that infrastructure exists, and implementing some of it may 
require more work than people want to commit. That's fine.

--
Quinn
http://woodquinn.x10.mx