Re: Mailing list traffic

* Daniel Glazman wrote:
>First, nature hates vacuum: turn one list into 4 and we'll
>end up with four times more traffic to read and digest. Second,
>co-chairmen of the WG have to digest www-style to work on agendas and I
>certainly don't want to multiply that work by n. Third, the recent
>increased traffic in www-style was created by some endless discussions
>that don't always have an immediate technical value for the
>standardization work (128 messages about "Forums" for instance); in
>short, this is part of the signal/noise ratio that is inevitable when
>standardization work like ours happens in public. Create new lists and
>you'll soon have the same problems there plus the fact people not
>familiar with us will never know where precisely post a request/comment.

The suggestion was to start making plans, and the first step there would
be making an analysis of what's going on to find suitable solutions. If,
for instance, many of the mails are one-liners sent in short intervals,
that may mean existing real-time chat mechanisms do not work well for
some participants and we might want to try and fix that. Or there may be
a push to "finish" certain documents, and it might make sense to split
that temporarily into a design team-ish list so people can generate what
traffic they need without them feeling they are flooding www-style. May-
be there is a need for a CSS Interest Group where people can discuss how
to improve community-related things without bothering people only inter-
ested in purely technical aspects. Maybe a lot of traffic is on features
that will not become relevant in a long time, then it might be a good
idea to make priorities clearer. Maybe there are common issues that are
being discussed with respect to many drafts, "what's good syntax" might
come to mind, where a temporary design team on a separate list might be
able to offer generic answers to that. Maybe there is simply a whole lot
more interest in CSS currently than usual and we should simply say to
expect these traffic levels and adjust their schedules accordingly.

In any case, the level and the spike here is indicative of a problem.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Thursday, 2 February 2012 03:28:00 UTC