Hi everyone,
HORSE:
>So this month we've removed the moderated status, one
>post a day etc. in order to discuss the future of the list.
>
>Give us your ideas.
The non-moderated list is wonderful for raising new thoughts and
brainstorming. What it has failed to do is to DIGEST and summarize any
progress made. The moderated list has proved to be not much better for
summarizing, but MUCH WORSE as a forum for productive discussion. Thus,
let me resurrect some proposals I made BEFORE MF and MD were split.
1. It would be much better to have a single discussion list. I prefer it
to be non-moderated, but would like to see changes implemented to avoid
chaos. It is too easy to fire off an immediate response and then see the
response to the response within the hour, and the rapid exchanges often
generate too many posts that lose everyone but those actively involved.
I think we need to has a system that encourages people to take their
time in replying. One old suggestion I made was to accumulate the
postings and send them out once per day. This would greatly increase the
turnaround time, and I believe that people would quickly learn to use
the time. Lets suppose the mail is distributed early every morning,
then one has the whole day to go over the postings, think about them,
and start drafting a response. If by the end of the day, the response is
ready, one can send it out to meet the next deadline - otherwise, one
can keep working on it. De facto, this is what happened in the old days,
when the Lila Squad mail was moderated, but most postings were allowed
through anyway.
2. We to do a better job of summarizing the discussions. One way is to
write essays for the web site. As an addition, I would like to see some
of the discussions summarized as digests. Instead of a moderator trying
to control the discussion itself, a volunteer editor could try and
assemble extracts into a coherent document. Dan Glover has already done
this on a grand scale when he put together Lila's child from the old
Lila Squad archives. I would like to see more people doing this, and
posting the digests on the web site. Of course, once a digest is put
out, the participants could continue to discuss the subject, and maybe
even propose revisions to the digest.
Thanks for listening,
Jonathan
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:33 BST