Re: Policy for expiring lists WAS: Idea for a secondary list server

* Joshua D. Drake (jd@commandprompt.com) wrote:
> On 03/02/2015 11:00 AM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >Having people use the main lists is *exactly* what we want to have
> >happen, in my view.  This notion that the PUG lists are good for peer to
> >peer help is flawed, in my view.
>
> The we just lost a whole swath of community. The traffic is just too
> high and if you expect people to manage their digest settings you
> have already lost the argument.

The lists are searchable and they don't have to subscribe if they don't
want.  I fail to see how posting to a PUG where they don't get any
response, or a response that's not accurate (I certainly don't monitor
all the lists) is better.  People who are interested in the overall
community are *way* more likely to get a better response to whatever
they're asking on -general or -admin than they will from any given PUG
list.  The way peer-to-peer help works is by having a large group of
people watching and responding and none of the PUG lists have that.

The DCPUG internal-to-meetup list certainly doesn't provide peer-to-peer
help either and no one complains.

> >>This is not a solution for new PUGs because:
> >>
> >>* We're not proposing to pay for Meetup accounts for every new PUG.
> >
> >I don't get why not.  As I understand it, there are resources available
> >for people who run PUGs from .US and possibly SPI and $140/yr is not
> >terribly much.  Further, that's for an organizer and one organizer can
> >create multiple meetup groups, as I understand it- perhaps have someone
> >who is already an organizer formally support creating meetup groups for
> >PUGs?  Maybe that's something that .US could help with?
>
> This is a bit more complicated than that. We (PgUS) certainly can
> set up a mailman instance but even PgUS now uses Gapps + Groups as
> it is free for a 501c3. I don't know that I can justify spending
> hard cash for something that is readily available for free. (We
> would likely be happy to set up Google Groups under the .US domain
> though).

You've utterly missed the point of what I was suggesting.  Mailman lists
are *not* meetup, sorry.  If .US can support *specifically meetup*, then
I think we could get a lot farther along the path of having regular
PUGs because meetup is what people actually use and the meetup based
PUGs, generally speaking, do quite well.  PUGs that just have a mailing
list clearly do *not* work out well.  If all it took was a mailing list
then why do we have a bunch of defunct ones?  Let's look at the actual
evidence instead of what we'd like to have happen.

> >Josh, we're not going to be able to provide something like meetup
> >without a heck of a lot of development resources.  If you're offering to
> >build an OSS meetup replacement then we can certainly talk about hosting
> >an instance for PUGs.
>
> A mailing list + the ability for there to be a PUGS "event" listing
> would pretty much provide everything a PUG needs.

I look forward to this OSS-implementation of meetup.

> The primary topic is a secondary list server because .org is
> difficult to work with when it comes to mailing lists. I think it is
> pretty spot on to mention we have also wanted other types of lists.

The pginfra team is *also* part of the advocacy and various other teams,
including core.  Please do not presume that the discussion carried on
here by members of infrastructure are only from the infrastructure or
resources standpoint.  It is not.
THanks!
    Stephen