Fwd: Leading the Forefront - with IRC ! ?

Hi everyone!

Like Guillaume, I'm a student and I also find it difficult to read
everything. I don't think this is the best way to organize so much
information. As soon as I arrived I found it unreasonable that we were
only using IRC and a mailing list.

I agree with Mike Schinkel. If 30 people are discussing a topic at the
same time on IRC, it must be chaotic! Even a chat between 5 people may
become confusing:

There are people who write slowly and then their replies are already
out of context.

Besides IRC encourages people to write short sentences. If you want to
write a full paragraph to explain your train of thought, you may want
to split it in several parts. Then someone already wrote a line in
between.

You may argue that someone wanting to write a more elaborate text
should do it by e-mail, but then we already have to gather information
from three sources: IRC, e-mail and archives.

In my opinion a forum would be a lot better:

a) Every topic discussed has its own thread, which is great if one is
only interested in that particular topic/task.

b) We don't depend on the storage of our e-mail account which gets
flooded with hundreds of messages we don't want to read.

c) We can also chat almost instantaneously like we are on IRC, plus we
can write lots of paragraphs and find quotes easily.

d) People who arrive later to the Working Group don't need to search
the archives to know how the discussion has developed. They only have
to read the whole thread. Reading the information in the archives is
not that good - conversations split and quickly become a tree with
lots of branches and twigs. A forum is a good way to organize all
this.

I know this has been already discussed, but arguments against forae
still don't convince me.

We may still use the mailing list for announcements and IRC if you
want to, but it would be great if everything was on the forum - it
would be like an encyclopedia, all the information would be available
there.



- Ana

Received on Tuesday, 27 March 2007 04:18:30 UTC