As a mentor, I have two comments:
- When requesting a new mailing list, it is critical to clearly define
the focus and expected community that would use a list. In particular,
showing specific threads on other lists that would be better moved to
the new list is helpful to give others a detailed explanation of the
kinds of things a new list proposer would expect to see on the new list.
Creating new email lists is simple technically, but should be approached
with caution in terms of the effects of splitting community energy.
- I highly recommend that people view through the slides for the
well-respected "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People" set
of slides:
https://sites.google.com/site/io/how-open-source-projects-survive-poisonous-people
The talk is worth watching, but for those short on time the slides are
worth reading. In particular, the aspects about how communities of many
different kinds of people (the vast majority who are not poisonous, by
the way!) can effectively work together on public mailing lists. A key
slide is pp 5, and pp7 as a followup:
"Attention and Focus
These are your scarcest resources
You must protect them"
- Shane
