Separately from how moderation is done and separately from the issue
that many traditional participants/contributors to a lot of OOo areas
are non-english speakers, I just wanted to mention an additional factor
about mailing list norms at Apache.
For community-focused lists, we should aim to have fewer lists rather
than more. Why? Because splitting lists and having discussions
happening in various different places tends to split part of the active
community.
Having a single ooo-dev@ list here can seem like there's a lot of
traffic on it (which there is!). But even if when people skip threads
that aren't of immediate interest to them, everyone has a chance to see
all the discussions happening. Having all the different discussions on
the same list ensure that everyone can stay on the same page, and see
where the active community of contributors is moving.
With multiple different lists running a single community, not only can
specific decisions not be well communicated to the other lists, but the
community sense is much harder to keep synchronized on multiple lists
versus a single list.
Note that it *is* appropriate to have multiple lists for different
functions or primary sets of participants - so I do expect that there
will be an ooo-user@ list, etc.
Does that make some sense? It's part of why it's a better idea to
transition project management into a few discrete lists here at
@apache.org, rather than leaving project decision making in a variety of
different places.
- Shane
NOTE: The above being said, I definitely see wisdom in Terry's comment
earlier in the thread about "B) an evolutionary one: ..." in terms of
making changes to existing forum management processes in careful and
well-communicated steps, instead of simply forcing changes in the
immediate term.
