[Zope] Forking the Mailing List

[Nigel Head]

> Forking the mailing list may make sense, except for the idea of a "NEWBIES"
> list. In any community, the ignorant learn by listening to the more
> experienced.  I suggest that the real problem is not that this mailing list
> covers too many topics, but that we need a better way to preserve, organize
> and retrieve the questions and the better answers.

<dtml-with delurk>

I definitely agree. Almost by definition, most of us were zope 'newbies' only 
a few years ago (I still am today). The proposal to split off a 'newbie' list 
inevitably means that some significant portion of the current community would 
intend not to subscribe to it (because it's bothersome etc) and that the load 
of supporting the zope 'school system' would return to the 'state' (DC) -- 
thereby consuming valuable, non-renewable DC resources which would be of more 
benefit to the overall Zope community doing something else.

Surely one of the best contributions the community as a whole can make to the 
continued progress of Zope is to try and relieve the 'core' crew (whoever 
that may be, but you all know who I mean) from work that other could do too 
and free them up to do the stuff that only they can do.

> In parallel to forking the list, I propose that we, as a community, with
> DC's guidance, determine the best way to capture the value of the mailing
> list -- a repository of problems faced by members, coupled with solutions
> from other members.

Sounds cool!

> My proposal is that DC builds or blesses a detailed topic map re. knowledge
> of Zope (Installation, RDMS, DTML, Security, the various products, etc.) on
> Zope.org, and invites members to contribute to filling in the topic map
> with questions, answers, example code, etc.  A FAQ + a topic map.  ZDP
> started this process, but this tool needs to be the first thing one thinks
> of before they ask the list a question.

Depending on what you mean here, this doesn't sound so good to my ears. The 
problem that I have is that I often find that someone elses view of an 
organisation into 'topics', or semantic nets or whatever just doesn't make 
any real sense to me -- looking for what I need becomes an excercise in 
figuring out what this nebulous other person may have thought when they were 
conceptualising it.

So - a counter suggestion:

Let's wind up the usage of the how-to's .. which are basically what we're 
talking about here. I propose that we:

1) Convert the howto's area into a (set of?) wiki(s) (so that we can all 
share in the maintenance, creation of cross topic links etc).

2) As a compromise towards a topic map approach, pre-populate the wiki 
with pages dedicated to certain key areas (the top layers af a topic index). 
Maybe a mechanical keyword frequency sort of thing could establish an initial 
set of references from these pages to potential related content from the 
how-to's :  the community would weed out the useless references which 
inevitably arise from such mechanistic approaches fairly quickly I think.

3) Try and persuade the **poser of a question** on the mail list that their 
social responsibility should include summarising the answers of a discussion 
into the wiki .. this may be the difficult bit, but I don't think so, based 
on the apparent high quality and helpfulness that I have observed in the Zope 
community (no coincidence, considering the overlap with the Python community, 
world renowned for their community atmosphere)

4) Plant references to the wiki in all sorts of highly visible places on the 
web site where newcomers will read them. 

5) Dicipline ourselves to take some of the more detailed list discussions off 
to the wiki instead when they get too specialised (a judgement call, but for 
example Dr. What and the crew talking ZSQL probably only interested a small 
portion of the list -- the ZSQL users -- after a while).


The danger, if you want to call it that, of this approach is the total, 
unstructured anarchy that may result -- personally, I think my brain is sort 
of an unstructured mess anyway, so I feel at home in such areas -- but I 
suspect that the self regulation of the community will clear up the total 
rubbish fairly quickly (rather like garden ponds, which occasionally go 
through grenn, murky, algae infested periods but turn clear again eventually).

>
> I would love to buy a book that extracted the best questions and
> answers/examples found on this list in the last two years, weeded out the
> fluff, and organized the rest.
>
> Brian
>
>
>
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