On 07/24/2013 09:55 PM, Jesse Shumway wrote:
nudge - to coax or gently encourage, to touch or push, to prod gently, typically with one's elbow.

Make a sytem's default the behavior you wish to encourage… so sign 'em up!

Let me inject a bit of institutional memory here; I hope it's helpful.

Originally in 2002, HCoop was just a set of friends sharing a server. The earliest levels of evolution maintained group dynamics not too far from the starting point. We had just one mailing list for everything, from "there will be downtime tomorrow" to "can you recommend me some blog software?".

At some point I realized that many members were not interested in reading the high volume of messages that can be generated in some threads (like this one, actually). These members would start ignoring all HCoop-related e-mail, which causes a variety of logistic problems. That's why I created multiple mailing lists, including an announcements list that everything must be subscribed to and a discussion list that is opt-in. There is a serious risk that opting certain members in to the latter by default will cause them to decide "HCoop sends too much e-mail" and ignore _everything_ we send. We had some members who were intimidated at the thought of understanding what a mailing list is and how to control subscriptions.

From this perspective, it's an especially bad idea to decide on a change by polling those members who happen to be paying close attention to hcoop-discuss.

Online social dynamics can change a lot in 10 years, so maybe it doesn't make sense to think too much about past experience, but it seems worth considering.
_______________________________________________
HCoop-Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.hcoop.net/listinfo/hcoop-discuss

Reply via email to