On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 03:05:12PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote: > Right now I can rely on my notmuch database to pull basically any Debian > discussion, because it includes the BTS, lists, and mail which I was > CCed on or received through an alias like ftpmaster@. And one can > easily incorporate mboxes from master.d.o or bugs.d.o to get any missing > context.[1]
I think archival's a very good point, especially for a DEP-like discussion. You also implicitly propose an archiveal format that I like, namely some kind of email mailbox. I'd say that having a mailbox for archival would not be necessarily needed during a discussion, and would make sense once the discussion is declared closed. Discourse has some email gatewaying, which as far as I understand loses some metainformation like reactions or polls. It would be something I thing should be preserved from an archival point of view. Does Discourse have some kind of export feature, that one could postprocess to get for example a mailbox of annotated emails? > Could you say more about how you think Discourse would have changed how > the discussion went? Things that the current list discussion doesn't easily give: - +1 kind of feedback, or simple agreement, tends to unexpressed: people only reply if they have a problem with things, and shut up otherwise. For example, the recent Salsa as OIDC provider discussion had a relatively small amount of people contributing: does it mean that a lot of people just agree, or does it mean that only few people care? Silent assent and only negative feedback is a very demotivating process to go through putting a proposal up for discussion. - Some kind of weighting of posts. Sometimes I wonder: "is it just me, or this objection is not that relevant?", and I have no real way to know, besides maybe polling my social bubble, which could be biased. Ranking of perceived importants of topics or aspects discussed might have helped me manage the energy I put into the whole discussion, going into more detail where I could see there was more interest or concern. > I am concerned that the problem is basically a social one, and so cannot > be solved just by using a different software stack to host discussions. Ish. I think there are may social aspects involved, and the same time the process that we currently use has technical or traditional limits which filter against various kinds of feedback which people would socially be happy to give. I follow list discussions and some messages make me go "yay! Standing ovation!" and some messages I skip after reading part of the first line, and some messages make me furious. Socially we might able to express that in a way that feeds into the quality and direction of discussions, but technically, we currently cannot. Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/634F4BD1E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enr...@enricozini.org>
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
