on Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 03:53:58PM -0400, Jaldhar H. Vyas (jaldhar@debian.org) wrote: <...> > Except in this case these are YOUR boots on YOUR feet. Or a more apt > analogy: Linux is like a village common. You've heard of the economic > concept of the "tragedy of the commons" right? If too many people take > from a public resource without giving back, it swiftly gets destroyed. ObTotCNit. Not so. I just wrote up a bit about what TotC is at MeatballWiki, to which this link may prove an interesting test of the WikiWay.... OK, actually, looks like I haven't committed the changes yet, but skip on over to http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?TheTragedyOfTheCommons Point: TotC refers to resources which are rivalrous in consumption. *Using* GNU/Linux isn't going to prevent anyone else from using it -- you're not using anything that another user can't access because of your presence. Communications bandwidth is another issue. Network communications grow according to Metcalfe's law: the square of the nodes. Fortunately, mailing lists are pretty resilient to such effects -- most of the conversation is node-to-node, without effecting other nodes or a central chokepoint (other than the listserver). Usenet, being even more decentralized, is even more scalable (weblogs, incidentally, are poorly scalable because of the centralized load). So you need effective means of managing the rivalrous resource. In the case of a list, it's large topic-scanning -- I flip through new posts, looking for responses (or references) to me, then scan for topics of interest, then look for unanswered, non-response, posts. I'll typically delete deeply nested threads (such as this one)....unless I'm one of the provocateurs. They've generally drifted off-topic. At some point, mailing lists grow to a size that's no longer manageable. Depending on the topic, this may be several hundred to several tens of thousands of users. At this point, some form of subsetting of the list becomes essential. One of my side interests is in developing the filtering tools and algorithms to aid in sifting through such data. Kuro5hin (see sig) is a partial implementation of same, MeatballWiki is a site at which some related discussion is occurring. Cheers. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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