Discussion tooling (was: Bits from the DPL (August 2019))
* Jeremy Stanley: " Re: Bits from the DPL (August 2019)" (Tue, 1 Oct 2019
20:45:35 +0000):
Hi,
first of all it would help a lot to identify when a new subthread is
openend and make this visible in the usual way (like this mail does). It would
increase a lot(!) the readability of Debian lists where this is an
often encountered problem. BTW no discussion tool can help in automating
separate discussion threads when the topic changes.
This subthread started on the question how legitimate it is to assume consensus
with the repect to the fact of the high volume of the last months, affording a
lot of time to read and of course even much more to participate. While I am
very thankful to Sam to invest his energy in driving those important
discussions I agree, that the pure volume of the different, sometimes parallel
topics exceeds at least the time I could invest to participate and I assume the
same for other fellow developers. Finally we are responsible to take care of
our packages and that is what I am prioritizing over discussion as long as I
don't feel a very strong need to say something.
Meanwhile we are at the often introduced question if better tooling could help.
I don't think another tool can save a lot of time. We *ourselves* can help
that with more discipline in following the good old rules in marking subthreads
when they are going offtopic. Finally the scheduling of the different topics
led partly to the fact that only quite few members could participate. This will
be a constant problem in a project of volunteers and I think we will have to
live with that fact.
> On 2019-10-01 16:13:03 -0400 (-0400), Sam Hartman wrote:
> > A couple of people active in Gnome have suggested discourse for
> > this sort of thing. It's got enough email integration that perhaps
> > we would not lose people who want that interface.
> >
> > I t would be interesting if someone wanted to spend the time to
> > pilot that.
>
> Discourse is a Web forum platform with some mailing list features
> bolted on. An alternative might be Mailman 3, which is a mailing
> list platform with Web forum features bolted on. Both suffer from
> the same problem though, which is that people who want to interact
> via Web forums and people who want to interact via mailing lists
> have preferences for different communication styles with some
> fundamental incompatibilities, particularly where the relative
> culture and etiquette of those diverge.
Adding to that it is not easy to respond to discourse threads in the correct
quoting style and format via email. It is even not comfortable to read them
via mail. This problem seems to lead to the prefered configuration of Discourse
to only send emails, but disable answering.
You will definitely lose me when I am forced to enter such an online platform to
follow and participate in discussions.
--
Mathias Behrle
PGP/GnuPG key availabable from any keyserver, ID: 0xD6D09BE48405BBF6
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