Quoting Svante Signell ([email protected]): > (personally I heavily dislike forums :( Why not use plain email and > publish stuff on web pages??)
I _tend_ to share your view, but we should always beware of what I call FirstThursdayism. If I were really mean, I'd call it McLoughlinism, but I'm trying to be nice. Time for a story.... Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I was editor of the 40 page monthly magazine _Blue Notes_ for San Francisco PC User Group. SFpcUG had a talent for committing interesting organisational errors in a large and creative variety of ways, and I always looked forward with eager anticipation to the next one. (I immortalised one such anecdote about SFpcUG politics in the Linux User Group HOWTO, http://linuxmafia.com/lug/User-Group-HOWTO-7.html#ss7.4 .) One time, SFpcUG President Tom McLoughlin was trying to figure out what was the best day of the week for the monthly meeting. (I try not to mock Tom. He's a nice guy, and was trying to do the right thing for members.) Tom dealt with his statistical sampling problem, thus: 1. Convene the current first Thursday meeting at the current location. 2. Ask how many members in attendence like first Thursdays. Trying not to smile, I gently pointed out his unquestioned assumption that the subset of the membership present on the meeting was sufficiently representative of the whole. In particular, I said, it's entirely possible that people present on first Thursdays have a higher than average likelihood of finding first Thursdays convenient, and, if he'd asked a second Wednesdays crowd the same question, he'd be astonished at how much they tended to prefer that. A high proportion of people on mailing lists think mailing lists are great. A high proportion of people on Web forums think Web forums are great. Parties in my back yard are of course better than both, according to a poll of people attending parties in my back yard. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
