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I've been computing and using email lists and newsgroups, and Yahoo groups, wikis and
<div>all sorts of group discussions since the "good old days" (1984).</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I don't hink wikis and other newer tools are necessarily "better" for group communication. </div>
<div>For many things, I think I prefer to have a web sited that I visit, rather than having posts</div>
<div>trust in my face in my email in-box. But then after a while, I neglect to visit the web site, and I </div>
<div>loose track of what is happening with the group.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>But the biggest trade-off is when I feel I need to unsubscribe from an email list because</div>
<div>of too many replies to the whole group that could better be made in private among the 2</div>
<div>or 6 individuals who care about the sub-topic, which is off topic to the whole list.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>A GOOGLE search for [<a class="spell" href="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">Emily postnews
<b><i>netiquette</i></b></a>] brings up more, which ironically</div>
<div>is off-topic for this PERL list.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Getting back towards being on topic here, I was thinking that PERL programmers, and in particular</div>
<div>people who were "into" PERL enough to attend yet another conference on PERL, would</div>
<div>have some super-duper wiki or other modern communication device set up for this, instead</div>
<div>of a simple email list.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><a href="http://www.yapc.org/about.html">http://www.yapc.org/about.html</a></div>
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</div>
<div>Sure, there are the local PERL User Groups:</div>
<div><a href="http://www.pm.org/groups/north_america.html">http://www.pm.org/groups/north_america.html</a></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>but I am 90 miles from the nearest city that has one. So I'd rather interact on-line with</div>
<div>people working closer to my area of interest, the BIOPERL community:</div>
<div><a href="http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Main_Page">http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Main_Page</a></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Games, dinners, anti-dinners, hallway meetings, and HW++ are nice to hear about,</div>
<div>but maybe as a sideline to discussions of what to expect from a meeting, and not as the</div>
<div>main topics.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>There is a YAPC "discussion" on FaceBook</div>
<div><a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/YAPC/133538816686027?rf=145177855492256#">https://www.facebook.com/pages/YAPC/133538816686027?rf=145177855492256#</a></div>
<div>that looks like it has not been updated since 2008. </div>
<div>On Facebook, I do not mind all sorts of endless discussion and we have the ability to "like"</div>
<div>a topic and so on. But with e-mail I am expecting a lot less "traffic" unless the list offers a </div>
<div>daily or weekly digest mode.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So, could one of the "Hallway Meetings" get some folks together to discuss the uses of</div>
<div>social media (including simple email) to bring together Birds of a Feather, as well as simple</div>
<div>"friends and family"? There are things a bit similar to Facebook, such as LinkedIn and </div>
<div>ResearchGate <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/home.Home.html">https://www.researchgate.net/home.Home.html</a> and even GOOG:E+ </div>
<div>"communities" and GOOGLE+ "circles" (who has any idea what the differences are?).</div>
<div>Some of these things may be good, or better than simple email, for some subsets of the</div>
<div>PERL world.</div>
<div><br>
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<div><br>
<div>Brian T. Foley, PhD<br>
HIV Databases<br>
Los Alamos National Laboratory<br>
<a href="mailto:btf@lanl.gov">btf@lanl.gov</a><br>
505 665-1970 </div>
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