[MR] Two email lists for our kingdom?

[Woodrow Hill]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 18:02, William De Faleston <faleston at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is a bad idea. Discussions are healthy. Well, most discussions anyway. The problem is that  most discussions start FROM announcements. This means the announcements would have to be duplicated to both lists.

I'm familiar, via various techie e-lists, with groups that do exactly
this, and they do it for exactly the reasons noted -- because the main
list was so high-volume that the people who only needed the updates on
the code (read: events and key Kingdom situations) could not keep up.
What seems to have been occurring is that the quiet-yet-hard working
ones -- not the chatters -- were fading away as the volume of
discussion made actually working more of a challenge.

So my observations are that doing this IMPROVED the main list's
ability to discuss, not took people away. It seems to open up the
discussion, as people know the readers are there for the discussion,
and not simply to gather the key points they need and move on.
Counter-intuitive? Yes, yet I've seen it time and again.

Conversely, I do not think the implication smart that propping up the
Merry Rose, via insisting all comms pass through it, is a wise
investment of our energies as a Kingdom. Moreover, I do not grasp the
resistance to doing something new that's actually a tried and true
solution -- or, at least, asking around of groups, esp. other SCA
groups, that do such. That the forum "failed" is not an implication
that no other solution will not work, obviously.

> If your inbox is filling up, you may want to consider using filters to route your merry rose mail into a specific folder. Then you can simply open the folder and ignore anything with an RE: in the subject line. It's fairly easy to set up. I can point you to tutorials For just about every email system

My Merry Rose mail does go into a specific folder. However, it's still
a lot of mail at times like these, and much of it is undifferentiated
between fun chatter, important announcements, and discussions on both
-- or more. Also: Both digest and filtered mail still requires the
cognitive load of skimming subject lines for key points; systems like
Gmail make it easier, but not a no-brainer. I do not think this is a
win for the problem at hand, which is mail overload _within_ the Merry
Rose, such that we readers dredge for key topics.

I love technology -- yet in this case, I think the old ways (at least
this old way, in Internet years) are best, and most accommodating.
Indeed, it would be just as simple to set up a filter for emails that
go to both lists, and have them "only' appear in one, as any other
filtering solution.

> William de Faleston

----asim