Concerning the Email Threads vs Google groups or whatever.

Gabor Szabo szabgab at gmail.com
Thu May 23 00:08:22 PDT 2013


hi Brian,

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 12:46 AM, Foley, Brian T <btf at lanl.gov> wrote:

> 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.

I am subscribed to a lot of mailing lists. In most of them I just
"lurk". Look at the subject,
sometimes even at the content of the messages and then delete the mail.
There are many cases when I am interested what others say but either I
don't want to
"say" anything. If those 2-6 who actually write and seem to be care
about the sub-topic
take it off the list I won't be able to see their discussion.

I wrote this in first person as I don't know how other think about
this, but various statistics
show that only 5-20% of the subscribers on a mailing list write in any
given *year*. So the
vast majority lurks. I have no idea if they read every single message
or auto-delete everything.


> 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

YAPC::NA has a wiki http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/wiki
and IRC channel and mailing list and probably a lot of other ways to
communicate.
and G+ page, FB page and Twitter account and ...
You can decide which one to follow.

> 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.

For many people the social aspect of the conference is more important than the
technical aspect. For others, it is the opposite way. The technical
part - the presentations
is usually mapped out fairly well by the organizers and usually you can see this
in the schedule: http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/schedule
OTOH the social part is to a large extent self-organized. The YAPC
organizers provide
the 'platform' aka. the rooms, and they organize some of the social events,
but I think most of the social events are self-organized by the participants.
Hence you hear a lot more about those on the public forums (mailing
list, IRC etc.)


>
> 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.

I think Facebook never caught-on with many of the Perl developers.
Google+ seem to attract more of them.

Again, I can only give my own example: I configured my e-mail client
to move all the YAPC related messages in one folder. That allows me to
filter those out. Then I can go over the messages when time permits.
eg. once a day
*and* it organizes them in threads.
I find it much better (for myself) than having a digest.


>
> 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.

See "Social connect" on the right hand side of http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/
for links how to "follow" YAPC::NA on your favourite social network.

There are a few Perl related communities on G+ and on Facebook,
but as far as I can tell, they are not used a lot.

regards
Gabor


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