Nadav Har'El wrote:
On Thu, Dec 01, 2005, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote about "Re: An out of the box
solution?":
As I see that the audiance is people which are involved and care about FOSS and
which the use mailing list method drives them away.
Dotan, what you're saying doesn't make much sense. First, Hamakor's mailing
list is just one tool it uses to keep members connected.
I'm talking of breaking the limited members circle and get more people
to be involved in the discussion which are the essence of Hamakor (as
its pointed time and again that the activities are driven by the people
and not by the amuta) in hope they will also take part in the activities
when they get the larger picture.
There are also
snail-mail letters, there are physical assemblies, conferences (like August
Penguin), not to mention members who meet in various occasions, and so on.
That remains in the limited members circle.
Hamakor members also frequent Web-forums and other venues for discussions,
which were not necessarily created as an official Hamakor medium (as you
know, Rashut Hadoar also wasn't created by Hamakor, but we use it for our
purposes ;-)).
They (hamakor members) are there as individuals and most forums readers
are kept out of the circle as they are not updated/informed by all the
means you detailed above and untill recently they didn't have any option
to follow Hamakor discussions and ever since theres an option they were
not informed about it (partly because I wasn't asked to inform them)
But all that being said, email *IS* an important method of communications.
True and you are welcome using it.
You cannot just discout it as being "inconvenient". If this Ram Matityahu
refuses to use email and email lists, he loses out on much more than Hamakor
discussions: He will also be unable to contribute to most Free Software
projects! Do you think that if he tells Linus Torvalds to call him on the
phone or join him on some "forum" of his choice - because he couldn't be
bothered to subscribe to the linux-kernel- mailing list - this will ever
happen? Linus would just laugh at his face.
The similarity is odd ;)
Linus is not activly looking for contributors and when he does I'm sure
he knows what to do (including personal corespodance, phones and more).
Hamakor talks as if it looks for contributors but does nothing to reach
them and alternativly waits to be contacted by the means it dictate.
Alternatively, if Ram cares but really hates reading mail, he could ask you
(who does read the mail) if there was anything important. This is similar
to busy executives who don't have time to read journals and so on, so they
ask others to summarize things for them. They don't just say "this journal
takes too long to read, so I'll just ignore it".
Ram (as an example for the audiance currently left aside) can hold his
will to contribute but he offers it. Holding him back, by any mean, and
asking him to use mail is like asking a right handed to write with his
left one (you may also add in this particular case Shlomi's mail which
detail that "Alon eventually told me to let him write the site..." and
when you read, emphesise the "eventualy".
BTW I'm not a mail fan as you might have guessed and I'm certainly not
willing to read another persons mails. It takes too much of my time and
energy (elaborating the above example - it's like asking a right handed
to write with his left one each word twice).
Again, forums are not bad, and many of them already use them (e.g., Whatsup).
All of Hamakor's announcements end up on this forums. So what's wrong with
this? Would you want Hamakor to host its own forum on its own server? Why,
what's wrong with using an existing forum server?
Hamakor does extensive use of mailing lists. This mailing lists are not
accessible by most forums readers. There is a solution which can sync
forums and mailing list. At least one Israeli site implemented it and it
looks very good (at least as an opening stage if you want to adopt a
sceptic view).
Technically theres a solution and the only thing to stop it is a decission.
