The Scope and Ownership of fedora-list

[Timothy Murphy]

Chris Tyler wrote:

> This list, fedora-list at redhat.com, is one of the first lists that most
> Fedora users join, and therefore quite important to the community.
> However, it's a high-volume list (and is sometimes perceived to have a
> high noise level), so many veterans of the Fedora community aren't
> subscribed.
> 
> As the result of discussion at the last public (IRC) board meeting, it's
> been proposed that narrow the scope of this list a bit. The current
> description of this list simply reads:
> 
>    fedora-users: For users of Fedora
> 
> The proposed replacement is:
> 
>    fedora-users: Help and support for using the Fedora distribution.
> 
> Feedback on this proposed change is welcome.

(1) I doubt if a change in the description of the list
will make any difference.
I for one long ago forgot the precise description, if I ever knew it.

(2) I think the list works pretty well at present.
The majority of postings seem to me to deal with problems
that Fedora users have encountered.

(3) The only way of reducing postings to the list -
which seems to be the purpose of the exercise -
would be to moderate it in some way.

In my experience, moderating a newsgroup or mailing list
involves a huge amount of time,
which in your (or Paul Field's) case I would have thought
would be better spent on something else.

(4) Basically, the proposal seems to be
that the list should be censored in some way.
I am not against that in principle,
but I would like to know what would be disallowed.
Eg would references to livna be removed?

(5) The claim is that more experts would contribute to the list
if it were shorter.
I doubt if that is true; the reason experts do not contribute
is that they are doing other things, eg contributing to bugzillas.

In my experience, there are enough knowledgeable people on the list
to give comprehensive answers to most queries.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland