On Sep 29, 2018, at 1:31 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
Another way to think about this is if we wait until after our governance discussions and try this experiment the volume quite possibly won't be at a level to stress test how the interaction on Discourse works. And while I personally find day-to-day stuff manageable via email (but definitely not ideal), it's when the volume spikes horribly that I typically find email falls over the most. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I have not been looking forward to the governance discussions _because_ of the volume and I am too familiar with how difficult those discussions become difficult to manage via email.
I’d like to also point out that this isn’t a new idea, a year and a half ago we had the overload-sig whose idea was to solve this very thing (and Discourse was one of the options back then as well, as well as MM3, and uh… Github issues?). The results of the overload-sig were basically totally inconclusive because we never moved to the point of trying an *actual* list with *actual* traffic. So it just kind of fell to the wayside because we were never able to really test it out.
Testing out a new medium for discussion is always hard, there is a fair amount of churn involved in getting everyone to move over to the new location, thus you tend to want to try it with a small group of people to limit the impact. Unfortunately the downside to a small group of people is that they tend not to produce a large amount of email (and when it’s invite only, are less likely to need some of the more advanced moderation facilities).
So python-committers itself is still small enough that a mailing list doesn’t typically have the main problems that we’re trying to solve. However, the governance discussions give us a somewhat unique opportunity in that they’re likely going to increase the amount of discussion on this list by a fair amount. That gives us a chance to take an otherwise small list, and give it a more realistic test than it otherwise would be, without trying to tell the entirety of say, python-ideas, to switch to a new medium.
I do believe we have a problem though, and I think it is getting worse. I’ve personally more or less completely checked out of python-dev and python-ideas, in large parts because of the problems with email and mailing lists. We’re burning Brett out, and quite frankly I think that the nature of large mailing lists makes all of our discussions more likely to become heated.
With that, I urge everyone to give Discourse a fair shake for these next 3 months, and try to move as much of the discussion over there as we can. We’re unlikely to use either medium as the actual voting mechanism so if some people don’t come over, they’ll largely just miss out on discussion but will still ultimately end up able to vote. I personally am going to try to make this my last message on the mailing list during the duration of the test. I hope that you’ll all try it out as well.