Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes: > While discussing secret ballots over on debian-vote, we got a little off > topic and started discussing the value of a mechanism to express > agreement/disagreement with messages in a mailing list thread. > > >>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes: > Russ> Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> writes: > >> The bit that was supposed to be the conclusion of that was that > >> it might be good if we had some mechanism for collecting opinions > >> related to mailing-list mails/threads that was private, and > >> didn't involve making (often already long) mailing list threads > >> longer in order to express an opinion, but I think that's going > >> OT so should be discussed elsewhere, probably after setting up a > >> prototype. > > Russ> For the record, I like this, and in general I think there are > Russ> multiple areas of Debian where we could benefit from being > Russ> able to take a quick pulse of the mood of affected > Russ> contributors without relying solely on what people are willing > Russ> to write in (sometimes contentious) email threads. > > Neil did set up a prototype of Discorse a while back. It has good > facilities for this kind of informal polling as well as good facilities > for rearranging threads and that kind of thing. It's a bit different > than our mailing list culture. > > If I wanted to run such an informal poll today, I'd set up a salsa issue > for the discussion or at least for the parts where I wanted to get > thumbs up/down to various statements. > > I too think that such informal mechanisms would be valuable. What I had in mind was something rather different from that, I think. I would hope to have a way of responding to any mail in our mailing lists, preferably via something that I could bind to a keystroke in my mail reader, without needing anyone to set up a poll in advance. I'd expect the service to keep a tally, but keep the identities of voters secret. I'd also restrict the right to vote (with criteria depending on the mailing list) to avoid people making up IDs to skew votes, or random passers-by voting because they found a link somewhere. With such a service, one could gather opinions simply by saying "Please respond to this mail via the thumbs-o-matic" and have an instant poll with no effort. Also, if someone started a divisive GR discussion, instead of it immediately starting a flame war, it might instead mostly provoke a big thumbs down on the thumbs-o-matic, and one of the responses to the discussion could simply mention that fact, pointing at an automatically generated graph. That would then give the proposer the chance to encourage their claimed silent majority to see if they can push the figures into the positive, and if not, one could hope that the proposer would have the sense to give up early. I could also imagine setting up my mail program to query the thumbs-o-matic to help it decide how to sort or present my mail. If a lot of people adopted demoting unpopular threads in that way, fewer people would be drawn into some of our more pointless discussions because they'd be more likely to skip reading them, before becoming upset. People might not feel quite as strong an urge to tell someone they were wrong via mail, if the mail they were disagreeing with had some marker indicating to them that it had already been disliked by quite a few others. One possible downside of this is that if it were easily possible to query it for the most unpopular threads in Debian, it may become either a shopping list, or some sort of badge of honour, for trolls. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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