Hi all,
When the initial discussion arose about the creation of the sys admin
list, I sat on the sidelines and watched the discussion, but I didn't
offer an opinion because I'm not a sys admin, and I think the sys admins
should make the decision. However, I do subscribe to all the lists, and
there was a reason why I quickly gave a +1 to Chris' proposal.
On occasion (not often, but, as Chris related, there aren't many posts
to the list), I have seen people new to the community post a question to
the list that remains unanswered or requires a follow-up email before
somebody offers an answer.
I'm picturing a new Evergreener, who is lost trying to figure out this
system and the community at the same time, sees there is a sys admin
list available, and posts the question not realizing that there are very
few people who are monitoring this list and replying to emails.
It's quite possible that those questions would have remained unanswered
on the general and dev lists too (I've seen the same sequence of events
happen quite often there too), and maybe eliminating the sys admin list
wouldn't help those people. But I am concerned that we are doing a
disservice to new community members by telling them a list is available
to help them when there don't seem to be many experienced folks who
could help them actively participating on that list.
On the other hand, the catalogers list, which was set up around the same
time as the sys admin list, also has less activity than the general
list, but, when somebody posts a question, there always seem to be many
catalogers ready to respond.
Just my 2 cents.
Kathy
On 01/14/2015 11:35 AM, Lazar, Alexey Vladimirovich wrote:
-1.
Using similar logic, the cataloguers, web team, reports, DIG and even the dev list
should also be eliminated. They are all low-traffic and the general list serves as
the all-purpose venue for any of the content there, because “general" means
anything and everything.
I suspect that low list membership and low traffic are somewhat of a
chicken-egg type issue where one leads to another and vice versa.
My counter-recommendation is to invite people to subscribe to all topical lists
and when posting messages to first consider posting on one of the sub lists and
then if none fit the bill, use the general list.
In theory, this should lead to a cleaner separation of posts by topic, where
the general list is used more for general announcements - future development
proposals, future functionality discussion, new releases, event and community
announcements - general topics, while more of the specific user and technical
discussion is done using the topical lists.
On 2015-01-13, at 15:02 , Chris Sharp <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,
I administer or co-administer all of the open-ils/evergreen mailing lists, and
I would like to make a motion that we deactivate the Evergreen-Admin mailing
list. It is a very low-traffic list (maybe a dozen monthly posts at its
busiest) with low membership (75 members), and most of the questions asked
there would be appropriate for Open-ILS-General. The list became active in
September 2012 in response to an IRC discussion
(http://evergreen-ils.org/irc_logs/evergreen/2012-05/%23evergreen.18-Fri-2012.log)
where the majority of attendees wanted a dedicated system administration
mailing list.
In my view, the Evergreen-Admin list duplicates the purpose of this, the
General list, in that the General list serves as an all-purpose venue for
(non-development related) technical help in running Evergreen. If you agree,
please +1, otherwise, please state your case for keeping it. ;-)
Thanks!
Chris
--
Chris Sharp
PINES System Administrator
Georgia Public Library Service
1800 Century Place, Suite 150
Atlanta, Georgia 30345
(404) 235-7147
[email protected]
http://pines.georgialibraries.org/
Aleksey Lazar
IS Developer and Integrator - PALS
http://www.mnpals.org/
--
Kathy Lussier
Project Coordinator
Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative
(508) 343-0128
[email protected]
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier
