[OT] How We Discuss Things

Edwin Pilobello edwinp13 at home.com
Wed Aug 1 00:01:59 UTC 2001


How relevant and meaningful!  Hope something is actually done with this.

I have just filed off 1000+ messages from my Inbox into separate Mail
Folders.  Whether its a segregated or targetted discussion group or user
tools to filter, thread or whatever,  COUNT ME IN!

My one wish (I'll sleep on the rest for now) is to be able to make or
identify key words, paragraphs, thoughts as an object.  Then as objects ...
well, we all know what we can do with objects.  We can all deal with them as
we wish.

:-)  edwin

-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org]On Behalf Of
Rosemary Michelle Simpson
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 4:24 PM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Cc: Squeak List
Subject: Re: [OT] How We Discuss Things



On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Dan Shafer wrote:

> As someone who has been involved in the online world longer
> than I care to admit and as someone who has  been deeply
> involved in online community for the past several years, I am
> intrigued by the fact that the Squeak community -- with one of the
> richest and most powerful environments on the planet
> presumably at everyone's disposal -- still feels most comfortable
> discussing our mutual interest in the relatively inefficient halls of
> a mailing list.
>
> I don't subscribe to the list by email any longer (though I spent
> the past year doing so) because I found it too cluttered an
> experience, regardless of whether I used the digest or dealt with
> individual emails. Following threads was very difficult at best and
> filtering out topics in which I was not interested proved all but
> impossible.
>
> Dealing with the list in quasi-discussion mode via the Yahoo!
> interface is a tiny bit more satisfying, but only a tiny bit.
>
> It seems to me that if we moved from the older mailing list model
> to a true discussion board or Swiki model for all of our
> discussions, we'd all be enriched and our experience would be
> both more effective and more efficient. But I never hear anyone
> suggest this, which indicates perhaps I am alone in my feeling
> that this is such an archaic and relatively inefficient way of
> dealing with such material.
>
> If Swiki isn't the right tool -- and I see some drawbacks to it that
> are addressed in every good discussion board tool I know about
> -- then perhaps a real discussion board tool is?
>
> There is a way to experiment with this. I have access to a
> licensed Web Crossing discussion site where we could legally
> and easily reflect the mailing list in discussion topics and allow
> people to particpiate directly on the disussion board or via email
> or even mix those modes. I'd be willing to set up the site and
> open it to people who are interested in trying that mode of
> communication. It wouldn't disrupt the list any, but since it's not
> my list I don't think I should do this without some sort of
> agreement from at least some other list members.
>
> Or perhaps we can write (or someone has written) a discussion
> board product in Squeak?
>
> Thoughts?

I strongly disagree with Dan's position if he wishes to eliminate the
mailing list, because it eliminates a very valuable tool - email that
comes to me without my having to remember to go and participate.  I use
the Swiki a lot for searching for things, and for some contributions, but
in my day to day work I utterly rely on mailing lists to bring material to
my attention.  This is why newsgroups were useless to me - I never
remembered consistently to check them and so ended up out of sync with
ongoing discussions.

In addition, frequently I find that something I wouldn't have looked for
turns out to be relevant to a problem or an interest or it sparks a new
question.  Serendipity.  Mailing lists are for me a critical source of new
insights precisely because they bring things to my attention.

The issue, I think, is having a variety of tools for different mindsets
that captures the same material.  This is the issue faced by information
structure designers and indexers - providing different gateways into and
different structures over the same material.  Thus, we need the mailing
list *plus* other tools that could feed the mailing list content into (1)
spatial hypertext interfaces for exploring related material such as the
ConceptLab project I'm currently working on, (2) database archives such as
the Yahoo archive only with much much more flexible and powerful toolsets,
(3) Swiki pages, and other vehicles as people think of them.

The point is that the mailing list is not the problem; the lack of other
tools over the same material is.

R.







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