[clue-admin] Fwd: Linux Certification Study Group (LPIC-1)

[Jed S. Baer]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:29:04 -0700 (MST)
David L. Willson wrote:

> how ~should~ I make sure this sort of thing gets to all the interested
> parties

JMHO, but first off, I think you need to realize that there's no way to
*know* who all the interested parties are. The argumentum ad absurdum is
that you could just as well post such announcements to NANOG and 20 other
mailing lists, just in case someone on those might be interested too.

I've spent way more time being involved in online communities of every
stripe than most people would consider healthy for an adult. I'll also
admit that the old norms seems to be slowly eroding away, particularly as
more and more people get online, without having to work at it, and in
ways that simply didn't exist back when the norms of netiquette evolved.
For example, if someone's main community presence is MySpace and Twitter,
they surely won't learn any behaviors conducive to playing well in
Usenet. But I digress. One of the norms, in my experience, is that
cross-posting is discouraged -- not completely, I admit. But when there's
a high degree of overlap in the membership of mailing lists, IMHO, it's
contraindicated. I'm on all but one of the lists, for example. So do I get
5 copies of every announcement then? Also, cross-posting will fragment the
discussion, if it occurs, thus, someone one, e.g. CLUE-Tech might ask a
question, and get an answer, and then someone on CLUE-Talk might ask the
same question. Everyone has their own level of tolerance, but getting the
exact same message multiple times is annoying, at least for me. No way of
knowing, without asking, of course, how many others feel the same way --
which is, actually part of my point. I prefer to err on the side of
caution, which to me means keeping the e-mail lists on the tidy side.

I'm also not going to claim that there's a bright line here. For example,
some time ago we talked about having Installfest discussions on
CLUE-Tech, because they're directly CLUE activities, and they're
technical. However, the Berkely TIP conference thing is being announced
on -Talk. Well, I'm not sure how to measure the degree of seperation
there, other than obviously the TIP things aren't "CLUE" activities.

I propose that we slightly modify the definition of CLUE-Announce, and
then do whatever to make it a known thing, and encourage subscription. Of
course, in my "retirement", I won't be the one doing the work, so it's
easy for me to suggest it. I think that that's the best way to come up
with a list of people who are ~known~ to be interested in receiving
announcements of CLUE and GnuFloss related things. To me, that's the most
natural fit. And since we don't seem to be using -announce for much these
days anyway, it's kinda sitting there looking for traffic.

Or, just use -Tech or -Talk. But please don't cross-post.

jed