<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 11:59 PM, Martin Langhoff <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:martin.langhoff@gmail.com">martin.langhoff@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div class="Ih2E3d">On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Farning <<a href="mailto:dfarning@sugarlabs.org">dfarning@sugarlabs.org</a>> wrote:<br>> With this in mind, the goal of creating new mailing lists is not to<br>
> fragment the existing community. It is to create footholds for other<br>> communities to develop around the central learning platform.<br><br></div>It's about economies of attention. Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler are<br>
probably the most insightful thinkers/writers on the matter. The<br>bottom line is (in my reading and experience):<br><br> - do not split the meeting point until the signal/noise becomes<br>uneconomic for _most_ (not just for a loud minority)<br>
<br> - do use tools that help individuals forage information better, so<br>that the split point happens later in time<br><br>In any case, communities are fragile and this is risky. Build up your<br>own community and then try to split it. Splitting the lists built<br>
around <a href="http://laptop.org/" target="_blank">laptop.org</a> is going to be a lose/lose scenario, and you are<br>playing with a social environment that has strong cohesion around<br><a href="http://laptop.org/" target="_blank">laptop.org</a> .<br>
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<div>We had some extensive discussions about this topic at FUDCon over the weekend.<br><br>My current take on the situation is that the lists hosted at <a href="http://laptop.org">laptop.org</a> should remain <br>there for the moment being. I don't see any real value and/or improvements in moving <br>
things to sugarlabs or elsewhere and agree with Martin that such a split can potentially <br>have quite a negative impact on the community.<br><br>I think what we really should be doing is a broad review of the current mailing lists and <br>
their use. Yes, OLPC / Sugar is a very diverse, distributed and multi-layered endeavour <br>but I can't be the only thinking that being subscribed to 30+ mailing-lists is <br>ridiculous. Also some of the mailing-lists are so small and unknown (e.g. peripherals, <br>
research, olpc-open) that consolidating them seems like an easy win and a good way to <br>improve things.<br><br>Cheers,<br>Christoph<br>P.S. Apologies if you receive this message twice but I'm using two different e-mail <br>
addresses to subscribe to IAEP and Sugar. :-/ </div></div></div>