On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 12:45:50AM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
On Thu, Apr 05, 2018 at 07:30:53PM -0300, ilv@torproject.org wrote:
Someone might "hey, but if we have a mailing list for language X, we should have one for language Y". To avoid this (supposing that we want) we could set some requirements like for example there should be at least one core member willing to run the list.
I think yes, we should try the experiment of making this list and seeing how it goes.
I like your notion of "there should be at least one core member willing to run the list." I'm tempted to suggest "at least two" to prove that we have some sort of critical mass before making a list, but I think we can figure out the more exact policies when we have tried this list and we're considering a second one.
But to be clear, it needs to be more than just "one core member interesting in *starting* the list" -- they need to commit to *running* the list, meaning keeping its discussions on track, moderated against trolls, etc.
I agree. And in this case that's what I was thinking when I offered to maintain the list.
A second principle that I would propose is that we have a periodic check-in point, like every six months or something, to decide whether the experiment is working as intended. If the list hasn't been used much lately at the check-in time, or things are otherwise not going as you originally imagined, that's a great time to decide to change things.
Yes, we can evaluate the status of this (and others if we go for it) at each Tor meeting.
George is totally right that there are risks with creating new lists, first because maybe you make a list that never takes off, frustrating the people who signed up hoping it would be something, but second because splitting communities can kill existing lists *too*.
So a third principle that I would propose is that the list runners should keep an eye out for things that happen on the list that people from the more "mainstream" lists probably want to know about, and send a periodic summary or something. Same thing goes for watching other lists for things that folks on the new list probably want to know about. And if you find yourself spending a lot of time telling people from different lists about what happened on the other lists, then it's time to stop and wonder if things are set up wrong.
Makes sense. I can do that for this first list and after some time we can evaluate how it is going.
Thanks for the comments, --i