[IAEP] [sugar] Fragmenting or providing a foothold?

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Zitat von Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>:

> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> With this in mind, the goal of creating new mailing lists is not to
>> fragment the existing community.  It is to create footholds for other
>> communities to develop around the central learning platform.
>
> It's about economies of attention. Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler are
> probably the most insightful thinkers/writers on the matter. The
> bottom line is (in my reading and experience):
>
> - do not split the meeting point until the signal/noise becomes
> uneconomic for _most_ (not just for a loud minority)
>
> - do use tools that help individuals forage information better, so
> that the split point happens later in time
>
> In any case, communities are fragile and this is risky. Build up your
> own community and then try to split it. Splitting the lists built
> around laptop.org is going to be a lose/lose scenario, and you are
> playing with a social environment that has strong cohesion around
> laptop.org .
>
> In some aspects, it's like proposing a split in a political party.

We had some extensive discussions about this topic at FUDCon over the weekend.

My current take on the situation is that the lists hosted at laptop.org 
should remain there for the moment being. I don't see any real value 
and/or improvements in moving things to sugarlabs or elsewhere and 
agree with Martin that such a split can potentially have quite a 
negative impact on the community.

I think what we really should be doing is a broad review of the current 
mailing lists and their use. Yes, OLPC / Sugar is a very diverse, 
distributed and multi-layered endeavour but I can't be the only 
thinking that being subscribed to 30+ mailing-lists is ridiculous. Also 
some of the mailing-lists are so small and unknown (e.g. peripherals, 
research, olpc-open) that consolidating them seems like an easy win and 
a good way to improve things.

Cheers,
Christoph
P.S. Apologies if you receive this message twice but I'm using two 
different e-mail addresses to subscribe to IAEP and Sugar. :-/