Having participated in many previous Haskell design efforts, I must say
that John's WWW-based system is MUCH better than straight email. With
email you have 16 different threads that are really hard to keep track
of; the tree-based approach keeps things better organized. A newsgroup
isn't as good either, even if threaded.
Another point is that my strategy for interaction is different; it's not
daily, as it tends to be with email. Rather, I pick an hour or two per
week (or whatever) to devote to the discussion; as a result I think I'm
more efficient. Also, John's latest addition of "colors" should help
identify the most active dicussions.
I can believe, however, that if you are just joining the discussion you
may find it a bit overwhelming. But what if you joined an email
discussion and were given an archive of umpteen messages?
By the way, I don't have any problem with WWW delays, even from home
over my 28.8K modem. Fortunately the link is to Sweden, not to the UK,
which is notoriously slow from the states.
I suppose that one improvement that you'd like and that I agree would be
an improvement is the ability to mark messages as read. I use the fact
that my browser changes the color of the entry to help me with this, but
that is lost next time around.
In any case, the committee certainly did not "deliberately discourage
the participation of those not on the committee"; indeed I'd say the
opposite strategy was taken. I think it's very unusual for a committee
to open its dialogue to the world.
-Paul
