Concerning the Email Threads vs Google groups or whatever.

[Foley, Brian T]

I've been computing and using email lists and newsgroups, and Yahoo groups, wikis and
all sorts of group discussions since the "good old days" (1984).

I don't hink wikis and other newer tools are necessarily "better" for group communication.
For many things, I think I prefer to have a web sited that I visit, rather than having posts
trust in my face in my email in-box.  But then after a while, I neglect to visit the web site, and I
loose track of what is happening with the group.

But the biggest trade-off is when I feel I need to unsubscribe from an email list because
of too many replies to the whole group that could better be made in private among the 2
or 6 individuals who care about the sub-topic, which is off topic to the whole list.

A GOOGLE search for [Emily postnews netiquette<https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&hs=Jcc&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=Emily+postnews+netiquette&spell=1&sa=X&ei=LzedUaW_GK6GyQHum4GQAQ&ved=0CC8QvwUoAA>] brings up more, which ironically
is off-topic for this PERL list.

Getting back towards being on topic here, I was thinking that PERL programmers, and in particular
people who were "into" PERL enough to attend yet another conference on PERL, would
have some super-duper wiki or other modern communication device set up for this, instead
of a simple email list.

http://www.yapc.org/about.html

Sure, there are the local PERL User Groups:
http://www.pm.org/groups/north_america.html

but I am 90 miles from the nearest city that has one.  So I'd rather interact on-line with
people working closer to my area of interest, the BIOPERL community:
http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Main_Page

Games, dinners, anti-dinners, hallway meetings, and HW++ are nice to hear about,
but maybe as a sideline to discussions of what to expect from a meeting, and not as the
main topics.

There is a YAPC "discussion" on FaceBook
https://www.facebook.com/pages/YAPC/133538816686027?rf=145177855492256#
that looks like it has not been updated since 2008.
On Facebook, I do not mind all sorts of endless discussion and we have the ability to "like"
a topic and so on.   But with e-mail I am expecting a lot less "traffic" unless the list offers a
daily or weekly digest mode.

So, could one of the "Hallway Meetings" get some folks together to discuss the uses of
social media (including simple email) to bring together Birds of a Feather, as well as simple
"friends and family"?   There are things a bit similar to Facebook, such as LinkedIn and
ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/home.Home.html  and even GOOG:E+
"communities" and GOOGLE+ "circles" (who has any idea what the differences are?).
Some of these things may be good, or better than simple email, for some subsets of the
PERL world.


Brian T. Foley, PhD
HIV Databases
Los Alamos National Laboratory
btf at lanl.gov<mailto:btf at lanl.gov>
505 665-1970

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