On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 04:08:06PM -0800, Yosem Companys wrote:
That's a great idea, José María. So you would like to see a new mailing list? What would you suggest we call it? Miscellaneous?
I've never administered any mailing list of this size (I think the largest had something like 15 people), so everything I say should be taken with a grain of salt. Some other projects out there have essentially two well-differentiated mailing lists: -announcements and -discussion. Jobs, events, CfPs and related material goes to the first one, everything else to the second one.
We are in the process of building a community blog for Liberationtech that would allow up/down voting of topics, polling, and other capabilities. Word Press is the gold standard, but it does not allow for the other features I mentioned. Any suggestions on what CMS or other software that we could use to accomplish this objective?
I think what you are describing is better accomplished by software like Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/), which is the discussion engine behind popular sites such as BoingBoing.net. This, however, presents the danger of making the mailing list redundant (I prefer the mailing list format, but that is just a matter of preference; I understand other people prefer web-based systems).
Another thing I have noticed is that, although we have a Twitter feed, we never really share or discuss any news on the mailing list. I actually think it is probably better that way. Subscriber-initiated discussions are usually more substantive and interesting. But perhaps we can integrate the Liberationtech list into a blog somehow in a way that shows more than just the last three tweets. Or maybe integrate Liberationtech's Paperli, which provides a summary of the day's Liberationtech news.
I'd love to read more discussions on the list. For one, I will try to send more news articles that I normally send somewhere else.
There are also debates about moderation. Should every post be moderated? A while back, we took a vote, and we decided not to do that because it slows the process of conversation a lot. What we usually do is that if someone violates the site guidelines, we will issue a warning, and if a violation occurs again, the culprit is permanently moderated. In some cases, we will moderate an entire thread until cooler heads prevail.
I prefer unmoderated discussion, with some "benevolent dictator" stepping in from time to time if stuff heats up too much. I tend to think of moderated mailing lists as slow and ultimately boring; however, some moderated lists I follow (nettime, for instance) are incredibly lively.
Cheers, JMM. -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
