[kw-pm] Why would anyone go to a Perlmonger's meeting?

[Matt Sergeant]

On 2 Jan 2006, at 20:06, lloyd carr wrote:

>> This may be unrelated to the real question, but from running other 
>> mailing lists I know that the "critical mass" of a mailing list is 
>> around 350-400 members - that's for constant chatter. 95%+ of those 
>> members never say a word.
>
> So I'm not sure what conclusion to draw. Are you saying talking to 
> this list is like beating a dead horse?

No, it's one of those fuzzy numbers, because as you see there's still 
conversation on this list, it's just quiet most of the time. I base 
this number on open source projects I've worked on. When there's less 
than about 350-400 people subscribed to the project's mailing list it 
is up to the project owner (i.e. me) to keep conversations going, 
mostly by responding to questions. After the 350 threshold is breached 
you can pretty much expect there to be multiple "experts" in the topic 
area to reside on the list and thus answer questions for you, and even 
pose some more interesting questions of their own.

> So what is the critical mass of a IRC channel, wait I know the answer 
> two, one person and one bot ;)

Actually about 50. What I mean by this is that take the kwpm IRC 
channel for example - people will regularly ask something on there and 
not get a reply from anyone for a good few minutes (even hours 
sometimes). At about 50 users on a channel there is constant chatter.

> Wouldn't the silent 95%+ plus be true of almost all group 
> communication situations even dinner parties ;)

It's an interesting question but I think with dinner parties there's a 
lot more direct questioning: "John, how do you like your new car?", 
rather than firing off a statement into the air and hoping there's a 
relevant response from the group.

> P.S. Yes unrelated, but very clever to reply and yet fail to answer 
> the real question, top marks!

What can I say - I don't lurk ;-)

It'd be interesting to find out whether people here are generally 
learning perl or just use it every day, and if they're just learning 
would they be interested in the Intro to Perl talk that Eric was 
talking of giving.

Matt.