[Overload-sig] Experimenting on real-world groups with potential solutions

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Guido van Rossum writes:

 > I know that Stephen believes that we have a social problem and hence
 > shouldn't try to solve it by technical means.

That's not exactly my position.  I don't deprecate technical
improvements -- simply allowing people to dispose of conversations
more quickly will reduce the burden, for example.  But we should be
entirely unsurprised if the social problems aren't resolved.

 > That's a common meme, but I'm not sure it is necessarily
 > correct. Technical solutions can very seriously alter social
 > behavior (e.g. chat apps on smartphones).

Alter, yes, but rarely is that alteration something we can tune to our
needs.  It may be a close match if we're lucky.

The main thing I see in web fora that would help is "collision
avoidance" by using a synchronous system.  Email is asynchronous, so
it's very frequent that you see multiple posts saying nearly identical
things (that's especially annoying when it's a chorus of "off-topic,
try c.l.p"), or beating a deceased parrot because they missed the
vet's declaration of death, etc.

 > And my sense is that the social problem we have *can* be addressed
 > by a change in technology, if we are willing to invest in the
 > change (like we are for e.g. the hg->git transition).

Not a good analogy to support the "solution to social problems" claim,
though.

 > All in all I can handle a very large amount of email efficiently. But
 > what's hard is discussions on python-dev and python-ideas, and I believe
 > part of the problem is due to the variety in email tools that people use
 > (and in workflows, and in experience and maturity).

Er, are you sure you want to mention social problems? ;-)

 > Note the focus on topics here. I am wishing for a UI that keeps the
 > discussions more organized.

That's dlists, coming more-or-less-soon to a Mailman 3 near you.  (OK,
it's not the only one, and definitely trackers and maybe Discourse
already satisfy that requirement.)

 > I think that as long as people's model is a mailing list with a
 > smart UI, it's not going to satisfy me.

That's not dlists.  Dlists really do create issue-like threads,
essentially multiple lists based on participation.

But it's still email; dlists do not help synchronize a thread where
posts arrive at 5-minute intervals.

 > You can configure it so that every email has a permalink to the
 > same message in the web UI.

Mailman 3 has that.

You should take the Mailman 3 advocacy with a grain of salt,
especially since dlists aren't available yet (not even as a patch).
However, I think the direction Mailman 3 is going certainly validates
your analysis (and vice-versa).