[sugar] Fragmenting or providing a foothold?

[Christoph Derndorfer]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 11:59 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org>
> wrote:
> > With this in mind, the goal of creating new mailing lists is not to
> > fragment the existing community.  It is to create footholds for other
> > communities to develop around the central learning platform.
>
> It's about economies of attention. Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler are
> probably the most insightful thinkers/writers on the matter. The
> bottom line is (in my reading and experience):
>
>  - do not split the meeting point until the signal/noise becomes
> uneconomic for _most_ (not just for a loud minority)
>
>  - do use tools that help individuals forage information better, so
> that the split point happens later in time
>
> In any case, communities are fragile and this is risky. Build up your
> own community and then try to split it. Splitting the lists built
> around laptop.org is going to be a lose/lose scenario, and you are
> playing with a social environment that has strong cohesion around
> laptop.org .
>
> We had some extensive discussions about this topic at FUDCon over the
weekend.

My current take on the situation is that the lists hosted at
laptop.orgshould remain
there for the moment being. I don't see any real value and/or improvements
in moving
things to sugarlabs or elsewhere and agree with Martin that such a split can
potentially
have quite a negative impact on the community.

I think what we really should be doing is a broad review of the current
mailing lists and
their use. Yes, OLPC / Sugar is a very diverse, distributed and
multi-layered endeavour
but I can't be the only thinking that being subscribed to 30+ mailing-lists
is
ridiculous. Also some of the mailing-lists are so small and unknown (e.g.
peripherals,
research, olpc-open) that consolidating them seems like an easy win and a
good way to
improve things.

Cheers,
Christoph
P.S. Apologies if you receive this message twice but I'm using two different
e-mail
addresses to subscribe to IAEP and Sugar. :-/
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