[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Motion to deactivate the "evergreen-admin" mailing list

[Kathy Lussier]

Hi all,

When the initial discussion arose about the creation of the sys admin 
list, I sat on the sidelines and watched the discussion, but I didn't 
offer an opinion because I'm not a sys admin, and I think the sys admins 
should make the decision. However, I do subscribe to all the lists, and 
there was a reason why I quickly gave a +1 to Chris' proposal.

On occasion (not often, but, as Chris related, there aren't many posts 
to the list), I have seen people new to the community post a question to 
the list that remains unanswered or requires a follow-up email before 
somebody offers an answer.

I'm picturing a new Evergreener, who is lost trying to figure out this 
system and the community at the same time, sees there is a sys admin 
list available, and posts the question not realizing that there are very 
few people who are monitoring this list and replying to emails.

It's quite possible that those questions would have remained unanswered 
on the general and dev lists too (I've seen the same sequence of events 
happen quite often there too), and maybe eliminating the sys admin list 
wouldn't help those people. But I am concerned that we are doing a 
disservice to new community members by telling them a list is available 
to help them when there don't seem to be many experienced folks who 
could help them actively participating on that list.

On the other hand, the catalogers list, which was set up around the same 
time as the sys admin list, also has less activity than the general 
list, but, when somebody posts a question, there always seem to be many 
catalogers ready to respond.

Just my 2 cents.

Kathy

On 01/14/2015 11:35 AM, Lazar, Alexey Vladimirovich wrote:
> -1.
>
> Using similar logic, the cataloguers, web team, reports, DIG and even the dev list should also be eliminated. They are all low-traffic and the general list serves as the all-purpose venue for any of the content there, because “general" means anything and everything.
>
> I suspect that low list membership and low traffic are somewhat of a chicken-egg type issue where one leads to another and vice versa.
>
> My counter-recommendation is to invite people to subscribe to all topical lists and when posting messages to first consider posting on one of the sub lists and then if none fit the bill, use the general list.
>
> In theory, this should lead to a cleaner separation of posts by topic, where the general list is used more for general announcements - future development proposals, future functionality discussion, new releases, event and community announcements - general topics, while more of the specific user and technical discussion is done using the topical lists.
>
> On 2015-01-13, at 15:02 , Chris Sharp <csharp at georgialibraries.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I administer or co-administer all of the open-ils/evergreen mailing lists, and I would like to make a motion that we deactivate the Evergreen-Admin mailing list.  It is a very low-traffic list (maybe a dozen monthly posts at its busiest) with low membership (75 members), and most of the questions asked there would be appropriate for Open-ILS-General.  The list became active in September 2012 in response to an IRC discussion (http://evergreen-ils.org/irc_logs/evergreen/2012-05/%23evergreen.18-Fri-2012.log) where the majority of attendees wanted a dedicated system administration mailing list.
>>
>> In my view, the Evergreen-Admin list duplicates the purpose of this, the General list, in that the General list serves as an all-purpose venue for (non-development related) technical help in running Evergreen.  If you agree, please +1, otherwise, please state your case for keeping it. ;-)
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> -- 
>> Chris Sharp
>> PINES System Administrator
>> Georgia Public Library Service
>> 1800 Century Place, Suite 150
>> Atlanta, Georgia 30345
>> (404) 235-7147
>> csharp at georgialibraries.org
>> http://pines.georgialibraries.org/
> Aleksey Lazar
> IS Developer and Integrator - PALS
> http://www.mnpals.org/
>

-- 
Kathy Lussier
Project Coordinator
Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative
(508) 343-0128
klussier at masslnc.org
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier