REPLY How to promote good work (SD6611)

[SDMAIL Bill Harris]

Posted by  Bill Harris <bill_harris at facilitatedsystems.com>

"SDMAIL Tom Fiddaman" <tom at ventanasystems.com> writes:
>> A few more wishes for discussion 2.0 expressed:


Tom,

Thanks for aggregating the comments people have suggested.  I'd like to
add a few:

- - No rewriting of headers to change people's names (I have to intervene
  manually to almost every email I receive from this list to keep it
  from thinking people's first names are always "SDMAIL").  In exchange
  for that, I'd be happy with prepending something like
  "[system-dynamics]" or even "[sd]" to the front of the subject
  header.  

- - No deleting of headers that allow threading of messages, for those of
  us who use threaded email clients and who now lose structural
  visibility into the organization of message threads.

- - Following something like the Well's philosophy of "You own your own
  words."  Among other things, I think that means that what we write,
  with all of its potential warts, is what gets posted.  Sure, some of
  us would, on occasion, forget to use inline replying
  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Inline_replying), some of us
  would forget to trim posts from time to time, and some of us would try
  to insert a bit of levity on rare occasions.  I think we are mature
  enough here to be able to self-correct for the excesses, and I think
  we would benefit from getting to know each other better by seeing not
  only the content of what people write but how they structure what they
  write.  

  With both the threading structure gone in this group and quotes from
  prior messages generally elided, it's sometimes hard to get the
  context for new messages that arrive.

  Based on what I've seen in other successful groups, I do think there
  is utility in some light-handed moderation; blocking messages totally
  that stray outside the broad bounds of the list (with a note back to
  the sender telling why) and trimming massive, untrimmed quotations
  (again with a message back to the sender) are the two actions I've
  seen sometimes on other successful lists.  The former includes
  messages that may be in HTML or include attachments (to the extent the
  software doesn't trim those); the latter focuses simply on trimming
  entire digests from replies from digest readers who top-post responses
  and leave the entire digest quoted below.


>> Specific sofware suggestions so far, with a few (+pros --cons ?questions):


I'd like to throw in one more alternative: mailman (the current system).
I think that's what other groups I belong to (e.g., grp-facl, arlist-l,
odnet, sdsustain, the now-defunct learning-org, evaltalk, ...) use, and
it works quite nicely in those settings.  People usually find homes for
attachments and then link to them, if they want to show a picture or
formatted document.  Those groups self-moderate with precious little
imposed moderation.

But I'd also like to suggest moving the dialog back to what objectives
we have and how we'll assess those and away (for a bit) from what tool
we'll use.  

I wonder if one of the objectives might be to improve the practice of SD
among those of us who participate here.

As one criterion, I'd suggest that a push system seems most likely to be
successful for occasional users such as we are.  Pull systems are great
in some circumstances, but I think those are often reference sites or
sites one deals with heavily throughout the day (e.g., a project
management site for a project one is working on most of the time).

Thanks again,

Bill
Posted by  Bill Harris <bill_harris at facilitatedsystems.com>
posting date  Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:54:06 -0700