Forking the mailing list may make sense, except for the idea of a "NEWBIES" list. In any community, the ignorant learn by listening to the more experienced. I suggest that the real problem is not that this mailing list covers too many topics, but that we need a better way to preserve, organize and retrieve the questions and the better answers.

<dtml-with delurk> I definitely agree. Almost by definition, most of us were zope 'newbies' only a few years ago (I still am today). The proposal to split off a 'newbie' list inevitably means that some significant portion of the current community would intend not to subscribe to it (because it's bothersome etc) and that the load of supporting the zope 'school system' would return to the 'state' (DC) -- thereby consuming valuable, non-renewable DC resources which would be of more benefit to the overall Zope community doing something else. Surely one of the best contributions the community as a whole can make to the continued progress of Zope is to try and relieve the 'core' crew (whoever that may be, but you all know who I mean) from work that other could do too and free them up to do the stuff that only they can do.

In parallel to forking the list, I propose that we, as a community, with DC's guidance, determine the best way to capture the value of the mailing list -- a repository of problems faced by members, coupled with solutions from other members.

Sounds cool!

My proposal is that DC builds or blesses a detailed topic map re. knowledge of Zope (Installation, RDMS, DTML, Security, the various products, etc.) on Zope.org, and invites members to contribute to filling in the topic map with questions, answers, example code, etc. A FAQ + a topic map. ZDP started this process, but this tool needs to be the first thing one thinks of before they ask the list a question.

Depending on what you mean here, this doesn't sound so good to my ears. The problem that I have is that I often find that someone elses view of an organisation into 'topics', or semantic nets or whatever just doesn't make any real sense to me -- looking for what I need becomes an excercise in figuring out what this nebulous other person may have thought when they were conceptualising it. So - a counter suggestion: Let's wind up the usage of the how-to's .. which are basically what we're talking about here. I propose that we: 1) Convert the howto's area into a (set of?) wiki(s) (so that we can all share in the maintenance, creation of cross topic links etc). 2) As a compromise towards a topic map approach, pre-populate the wiki with pages dedicated to certain key areas (the top layers af a topic index). Maybe a mechanical keyword frequency sort of thing could establish an initial set of references from these pages to potential related content from the how-to's : the community would weed out the useless references which inevitably arise from such mechanistic approaches fairly quickly I think. 3) Try and persuade the **poser of a question** on the mail list that their social responsibility should include summarising the answers of a discussion into the wiki .. this may be the difficult bit, but I don't think so, based on the apparent high quality and helpfulness that I have observed in the Zope community (no coincidence, considering the overlap with the Python community, world renowned for their community atmosphere) 4) Plant references to the wiki in all sorts of highly visible places on the web site where newcomers will read them. 5) Dicipline ourselves to take some of the more detailed list discussions off to the wiki instead when they get too specialised (a judgement call, but for example Dr. What and the crew talking ZSQL probably only interested a small portion of the list -- the ZSQL users -- after a while). The danger, if you want to call it that, of this approach is the total, unstructured anarchy that may result -- personally, I think my brain is sort of an unstructured mess anyway, so I feel at home in such areas -- but I suspect that the self regulation of the community will clear up the total rubbish fairly quickly (rather like garden ponds, which occasionally go through grenn, murky, algae infested periods but turn clear again eventually).

I would love to buy a book that extracted the best questions and answers/examples found on this list in the last two years, weeded out the fluff, and organized the rest.

Brian

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