David, As a part of the website development team I thought I might share some info which relates directly to what you were saying.
> Further to the discussions during to the conference call, my POV > concerning "communications channels" is that lists don't make a good > information storage medium. People quote badly, people go OT, people > rant, and ideas and info easily get lost in the noise. They *can* be > good for brainstorming. But very soon after each important thread > reaches a natural conclusion, someone needs to collate and summarize > the results and then post them to the wiki. We found exactly the same thing within the website team that too many rants were getting in the way of progress on many topics. With the steering committee's decision to move to Drupal within 6 months, the team who are currently working on the implementation had to tackle these exact issues. We have come up with a way to satisfy all (most) of our community with forums which would also allow mailing list functionality for those who would actually still choose to use it. For those interested the official Drupal development site is located at: www.libreofficeaustralia.org (sorry about the localisation, but I plan an Aussie group setup after it goes live on libreoffice.org) P.S. Anyone with Drupal theme experience would be greatly appreciated. Until the Drupal site is setup this kind of functionality will not be 'officially' available, but in the meantime the website team has been chatting through the mailing list, tracking the ideas and progress on the wiki and turning great ideas into reality. See: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website > (Google Wave is also great for brainstorming, in many ways, but takes > some getting used to, and also demands "posting discipline".) A 'Wave' is an open source federated communication protocol. In 'non-geeklish' we can install a wave server on our server and use either a web based client or desktop clients to access the server. This is a great idea. I will float the idea in the website mailing list and see what kind of response I get. -- E-mail to [email protected] for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/marketing/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
