Many subscribers to the Openhealth list value it as a source of enlightened discussion about not just open source software in health but also just about every aspect of health informatics - I certainly do. The list does not suffer from spam, nor are there endless flame wars with people calling each other rude names - something from which just about every other list I have subscribed to suffers.
However, some subscribers have complained, justifiably I think, that some of the discussion threads evolve (devolve?) into arguments between a few, often just two, protagonists over very arcane questions or, worse, over points of honour which are only of interest to those protagonists. Many people would prefer that such discussions be taken off-list, but there is often a reluctance on the part of one or both parties to these duologues to move them into a private space, on the principle that they deserve to be part of the "public record" of the OpenHealth list. I think that the establishment of an OpenHealth Wiki to complement the OpenHealth list (or whatever the replacement for the current Openhealth list ends up being called) offers a solution to this problem. As soon as a discussion thread starts to devolve into a duologue, or becomes of increasingly narrow interest, then it can be transferred to the Wiki, and any protagonists still interested can thrash it out on the Wiki. A Wiki which supports "subscription" to certain pages (i.e. email alerts whenever a page is changed, and/or updates to the page by email) would be essential. The only wrinkle is that some manual cut-and-paste work would probably be needed to capture the email thread up to the point that it was transferred to the Wiki. That's not the end of the world, but some form of automatic mirroring of the mailing list into the Wiki, or even driving the entire list from a Wiki, would be ideal. Do such things exist? A related idea is that of "nosy lists" which I came across in Roundup (a Python-based issues tracking system with both Web and mail interfaces - see http://roundup.sf.net ). Here is a description of nosy lists taken from teh Roundup design document: "Each item has its own list of interested parties, known as its nosy list. Here's how nosy lists work: 1. New items are always submitted by sending an e-mail message to Roundup. The "Subject:" field becomes the description of the new item. The message is saved in the mail spool of the new item, and copied to the list of all participants so everyone knows that a new item has been added. The new item's nosy list initially contains the submitter. 2. All e-mail messages sent by Roundup have their "Reply-To:" field set to Roundup's address, and have the item's number in the "Subject:" field. Thus, any replies to the initial announcement and subsequent threads are all received by Roundup. Roundup notes the item number in the "Subject:" field of each incoming message and appends the message to the appropriate spool. 3. Any incoming e-mail tagged with an item number is copied to all the people on the item's nosy list, and any users found in the "From:", "To:", or "Cc:" fields are automatically added to the nosy list. Whenever a user edits an item's properties in the Web interface, they are also added to the nosy list. The effect is like each item having its own little mailing list, except that no one ever has to worry about subscribing to anything. Indicating interest in an issue is sufficient, and if you want to bring someone new into the conversation, all you need to do is "Cc:" a message to them. It turns out that no one ever has to worry about unsubscribing, either: the nosy lists are so specific in scope that the conversation tends to die down by itself when the issue is resolved or people no longer find it sufficiently important. Each nosy list is like an asynchronous chat room, lasting only a short time (typically five or ten messages) and involving a small group of people. However, that group is the right group of people: only those who express interest in an item in some way ever end up on the list, so no one gets spammed with mail they don't care about, and no one who wants to see mail about a particular item needs to be left out, for they can easily join in, and just as easily look at the mail spool on an item to catch up on any messages they might have missed. We can take this a step further and permit users to monitor particular topics or classifications of items by allowing other kinds of items to also have their own nosy lists. For example, a manager could be on the nosy list of the priority value item for "critical", or a developer could be on the nosy list of the topic value item for "security". The recipients are then determined by the union of the nosy lists on the item and all the items it links to. Using many small, specific mailing lists results in much more effective communication than one big list. Taking away the effort of subscribing and unsubscribing gives these lists the "feel" of being cheap and disposable. The transparent capture of the mail spool attached to each issue also yields a nice knowledge repository over time." It is an interesting idea which seems to work well in practice (we use Roundup at work for tracking all sorts of issues). One drawback is that the Roundup repository is not searchable by Google or other search engines. However, it would not be difficult to periodically mirror the repository to a set of Web pages (a wiki perhaps?) which Google etc could index. I still think that the basic OpenHeath (or whatever we call it) mailing list should be a traditional list in which every subscriber receives every posting, but we do need a method to take arcane threads, duologues and arguments off-list while still keeping them as part of the Openhealth (small c) commonwealth. -- Tim C PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
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