[p2p-research] Mailing list efficiency, was: p2presearch Digest, Vol 19, Issue 153

[M. Fioretti]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 09:57:54 AM +0100, Wittel, Andreas wrote:

> this conversation is as important as it is obviously becoming very
> exhausting to participate. I have two questions:
> 1. is there a general feeling that this debate should be organised
> in a more efficient way?

speaking **only** of the mailing list part, my answer is YES! I (and
others) have said several times that this list is great, but making
sense of it and participating is very frustrating and much more time
consuming than with every other list I know. That's why I've ended up
using this list more as a read-only RSS feed.

> 2. if so, how could we do this?

The basic point to never forget about mailing lists is that everybody
involved in such conversations (both through the list and through the
archives) surely spends much more time *reading* lists messages than
*writing* them.

The obvious conclusion is that, to make an email-based debate as
efficient as possible for everybody, what must be minimized is the
total time spent by all subscribers to read and make sense of incoming
messages. NOT to write them. If everybody spends 30 second more when
**composing**, he or she will save much more than that, on every given
day, to read what comes in. When writing to a mailing list, always
give for granted that:

the receivers, even if close friends, have no clue of what you're
talking about because they are doing many unrelated things, and must
spend time to recover context, understand **who** it is that **you**
are replying to and why, what is quoted text and what isn't, etc..

flat rate connectivity is far from universal, mobile access will make
metered connections more common, at least for a while.

So, making email-based discussions efficient means to minimize the
time that people have to spend to make sense of what you write,
because the time you'll save by everybody doing so for common good is
much more than the little extra time you'll spend to make the
relatively little messages you write yourself more readable.

In practice, this simply means:

1) always trim as much as possible before even start replying

2) always use only standard quoted text markers ">", as they're the
  only ones which every email client on Earth will surely recognize
  and color differently (or collapse), making it faster to separate
  old text from new

3) always use a standard attribution line, ie some variant of "On day
  X, Tom wrote:" right above the quoted text (otherwise people have NO
  idea who you're replying about, unless they waste time checking the
  rest of the thread).

4) possibly, **after** doing all the above, answer **below** the
  quoted text, so even if readers have completely forgot what the
  issue is, they'll recover very quickly by re-reading the
  conversation in the same order it happened.

5) avoid cross postings unless absolutely necessary.

6) use proper subject lines and, if you receive list digest, never,
   ever leave the absolutely non-informative "LIST_NAME Digest, Vol
   19, Issue 153" subject line, replace it with a relevant
   subject. Lots of people never bother to open list messages if they
   can't realize from the subject if the content is worth their time.

Extra advice for people with big email signatures: you have one extra
reason to always do 1 and 4 together: not trimming and placing your
answer above the not trimmed text will GUARANTEE that nobody will ever
read the signature. Trimming as much as possible and placing your
answer below the quote, ie right above your signature, will guarantee
that more people see it.

If you want to make public email-based conversations as efficient as
possible, that's what you need to do. Private email, of course, is
another beast.

HTH,
	Marco Fioretti
-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84