On Wed, 14 May 2008, Sean Figgins wrote: > It seems to me that trying to enforce policy on any body with a > committee is going to end up completely useless. Committees can only do > committee stuff, like arguing points of politics. If policy needs to be > enforced on the mailing list, then it needs to be done so by a group > with more order. Enforcement in the real world is done by groups that > have a very ordered organization. There is a hierarchy, not a > committee. Look at the police or the military for good examples of > enforcement organizations. > > The question of whether or not the mailing list even needs such a group > is something that should be dealt with instead. I believe the NANOG > mailing list to fall in the category of a mature mailing list. It's > pretty much going to police itself, and pretty much has. That's going > to be most effective in the long run.
I was on the mailing list committee when it started, in early 2005, and was also involved in the discussions that led to the formation of the committee (this was a bit before the current NANOG charter, but was part of the same movement). I think even then there were a lot of different visions for what the committee would be. My view was that it should primarily be a group of people who would try to guide the discussion on the list in productive directions when it got off track (similar to what Alex has been trying to do with his thread summaries), with a secondary purpose of serving as a panel of judges (or maybe as a jury), when needing to decide whether to revoke somebody's posting privileges. We got bogged down in conflicts on the original committee too, but it seemed to me to start working pretty well after one of the original members left and was replaced. I haven't been following the recent situation, but my impression based soley on what I've read here today was that it was a repeat of the problems we had on the original committee. I'd expect it to work well again with the right group of people. In the early days, we did end up removing a few extremely disruptive list posters. It wasn't enjoyable, but I still think it needed to be done, and I think the list was somewhat better for it. But, I don't think any reasonable amount of enforcement is going to solve what I perceive as the biggest cause of the current low signal to noise ratio on the mailing list. At ~10,000 people with posting access, the list is just too big, and there are too many views among those subscribers about what the list should be. A tiny percentage of people who just want to talk about random stuff is still a whole lot of people, who can make a lot of noise. Groups of people who think the list exists to discuss their area of expertise can quickly make enough noise to thoroughly annoy people with different specialties, who think the list is for their subject area instead. I really hope that as part of the mailing list repair process, some further thought will be given to breaking it up into smaller lists for discussions of different subjects. That way we could have some clear guidelines on what is and isn't acceptable to post to each list, rather than getting into endless arguments about the purpose of the One True NANOG List. -Steve _______________________________________________ Nanog-futures mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
