[Vision2020] Chas leaves V2020; Liberal Moscow Dead? How might V2020 be improved?

[Nils Peterson]

The following is posted here
http://www.nilspeterson.com/2006/07/26/thoughts-on-improving-the-community-e
mail-list/

I could have arranged my blog to post to this list, and you could return to
my blog to post a reply. This is part of my exploration of the alternatives
outlined in this post....


Moscow has an un-moderated, city-wide email list called Vision 2020, hosted
by First Step Internet (thank you for that.) The mission is: "Moscow Vision
2020 is an informal, multi-partisan group of Moscow residents formed in 1993
to encourage more public information and debate about the future of Moscow
and Latah County."

On the list, I happened to catch Chasuk's departure note (he was a frequent
poster). A victim of flame war burnout. The waters closed over the corpse
with hardly a ripple.

And where is the Liberal Moscow blog? A V2020 alternative, announced in
early June 2006. I looked in via the RSS and the last post is mid-June.
Another corpse un-mourned, a better medium (blog + RSS) but no critical mass
on the site.

I have a research interest in these types of communities. What would enhance
the communication channel that V2020 can at times be? Chasuk spoke about
wanting a better signal to noise ratio. It seems to me that much of the
noise comes in the feedback to original posts -- questioning of the poster's
premise, elaboration, or conflation, of the issues. Simple provocation. For
some, that rhetorical exchange is clearly the fun of the list. Baiting and
pouncing. Word play.

The problem is, some would prefer that the 'exchange' were taken "outside,"
but then would it be fun, without a crowd to watch? For those who prefer an
information dissemination channel, or a non-personal rebuttal or elaboration
on a news or opinion piece in the DNews, the banter on V2020 is distracting
at the least and more often off-putting.

For a long time, I have been reading the V2020 digests. This reduces the
clutter in my inbox. I scan the table of contents of each digest for a
couple features. First, is the post original or a reply. Second, who is the
author. Third, what is the topic.

If the post is original, the author of good repute (to me) and the topic
plausibly interesting, I typically read it (However, scrolling from TOC to
item in the digest is clumsy.). If the reply is from a short list of
authors, and the topic formerly interesting, I read. This choosing is hard
to automate with a bozo filter alone.

Email seems to be a good vehicle for transmitting the content, but list
processor technology is clumsy for separating the good from the bad? How
might it look?

I posit that it would look like this:
*Original posts could be subscribed to, without any replies, and readers
could apply (or not) personal 'bozo filters' to the original posts.
*The whole dialog, or the whole digest, could be subscribed to, as it is
now.
*Threads could be subscribed to on an individual basis. Making an original
post, or a reply, would automatically subscribe the author to the resulting
thread.
*When reading a post, a reader would have the ability to one-click subscribe
to the thread and perhaps see a digest of all the preceding posts in the
thread.

---

Thoughts?