On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Rik Hoekstra wrote:
Karl Anderson wrote:
I read the 2-10 articles that I'm probably interested in, and miss the 95% which is almost always noise.
The question is why you'd want to receive all this if you don't have to (as remarked above). As I understood it, the discussion is less about tools and more about modes of discussion.
That's my impression, too. In fact, this would make a good case in point - this is part of a rambling discussion originally about, as best as i can tell, current wiki deficiencies for interactive discussions ("I feel your Wiki Pain:-)"). Focus in this thread has moved to merits and deficiencies of mailling lists for discussions - wiki is no longer the center in this branch, the zope-dev list was for a bit, and use of gnus for effective filtering of mailling lists is perfect fair game. I'm glad, though, that rik brings back in the issue that really concerns me - modes of discussion. I'm interested in what they serve. In fact, i'm *really* interested in "turning answers into stories". That is, not just getting answers to questions, but preserving them in a way that makes them easy to find when they're next needed - organizing them so they collectively serve to describe the topic they're about, to make the topic, as a whole, discoverable. While i think there are many modes of discussion that can serve this purpose, depending on the application and collaborative context, i think mailling list discussion threads need more. They're a step towards that building-together, but fail to organize beyond that - so the answers they provide are fragmentary glimpses into the topic at hand. One key way wiki documents help bind the fragments is by providing more "fixed points" around which discussions can range. The fixed points are not immutable - they can evolve - but they're easy to point at, and provide a definite manifestation of the topic at some stage of its life. The dev.zope.org proposals site is one example where definite subjects are at hand. As someone behind the WikiNG proposal, who *wants* to be able to reap the suggestions and details from a discussion, but knows i won't have the time for a while to actually concentrate attention on it, i dread having to collect all the messages, for later review for harvesting. Furthermore, messages on the mailling list tend to diverge more and farther from the topic, than they do when placed within the wiki. What i'd like the best, for now, is to have discussion happen on the mailling list *when someone wants to feel something out*, *and then they're responsible for summarizing in the wiki discussion page, if they have anything to harvest*. (Sorry if this message is a bit scattered - i think i saw an opportunity to tie together a lot of thoughts i have on this subject, but not sufficient time to do so cleanly, so i'm erring on the side of just-throw-it-in...) Ken klm@digicool.com