[Week-old draft] But subgroups require me to know what I want and what I don't want so I can absolutely have or not have them, respectively. This does not reflect real mail, where I am not sure whether I think Phunny Stuph is amusing or crass and have to see it first. The best way to do this would be to have all the mail delivered, but in separate bins, so that I can see each pertinent part of the whole at a time without having to work my way through all the rest, mixed in. This would require some mechanism in the email system to do this, though, like the mail program remotely implementing Gmail's "filters" (auto-applied "labels", which are just non-exclusive categories [tags, in other words]) - probably a security problem, and just hypothetical anyway. I suppose you could consider separate mailing lists to be Better Binning like that, and then if so we have the machinery for a solution (since many [but importantly not all] members are shared between FriAm, WedTech, and Discuss, so it is basically the same general community binned by topic type), we just need to keep the definitions in the lists clearer in our minds. So...what are they? As I understand it, the WedTech list is for planning WedTech and discussing topics that would be discussed at a WedTech event, and in the same manner: so, an instance of technology and what it means for the world? I guess the only WedTech event that I have actually attended is the one where my Supercomputing Challenge team presented our project, mostly involving an explanation of Dijkstra's algorithm. Then Discuss is discussing news items (including those local to Santa Fe, but maybe in not a predominant enough volume for that distinction to be significant) relating to the list's interests, namely technology, world affairs, and social trends. And then there is FriAm...which also has physical meetings, so presumably some of it is organising that, though from the time I have been subscribed it has been discussions ranging all over tech, science, philosophy, and social issues, incorporating both news and olds, with a good dose of interpersonal flavouring. I guess long story short, organising discussion is nontrivial.
-Arlo
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