[Fsatom-comm] New committee ; mailing lists

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 08:36 22/10/2003 +0200, Xavier Gonze wrote:

>  Nobody is yet registered on the fsatom-forum. We have to initialize it.
>  There are two possibilities : everybody from the fsatom list
>  can be registered ; or on the contrary, we ask people from the
>  fsatom list to register on fsatom-forum.

Mailing lists are unpredictable and difficult to get right at the start! My 
own experience (Henry Rzepa and I ran XML-DEV for 3 years with traffic of 
ca 10000 mails/year) is that single lists tend to work well in responsible 
communities with a relative stable membership. It is important to encourage 
good list discipline such as careful use of subjects, not copying complete 
messages unless necessary, etc. Also in my experience the ratio of readers 
to posters is often 10:1 so until something goes technically wrong or some 
abhorrent opinion is expressed you don't get feedback.

Also it helps to have a pseudo-moderator - someone who guides the emphasis 
and style of the list and occasionally makes proactive postings to generate 
responses. Another very valuable function is someone who abstracts heavy 
list traffic and highlights the most important points (in their opinion). A 
weekly summary (xml-deviant) was spontaneously created for XML-DEV and is 
still running.

If there are clear work programs with definable goals then it may make 
sense to have separate mailing lists but I would suggest that these are not 
created in profusion in advance of being needed. Often fairly technical 
discussion is appreciated by the community as it gives a sense of purpose.

Among the things to consider are:
- urging posters to reply to the list and not the sender
- avoiding crossposting unless essential. In general you should not reply 
to cross-posts as it soon upsets some of the lists as the topic changes
- making sure all previous quotations in replies are attributed if possible
- avoiding posting code, stackdumps, etc. to lists

and of course treating all contributions sympathetically and avoiding 
flamewars.

IMO the last two days have been of a very high quality

Peter