On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 12:46:53AM +0000, jg@cyberstorm.demon.co.uk wrote:
The thinness of the mag is, I am told, caused by Future policy on the "Answers" series of magazines. The quantity of advertising too.
Is this content v cost of paper then or what?
I don't know. I'm not involved in LA and not involved in dead trees at all.
It was the first thing that came into me head when I saw the cover CD actually.
...so I'd imagine it has already occurred to them.
[Yeah, my own website team list archives will be open as soon as we start keeping archives. Information wants to be free.]
Providing you get permission from the owners and there is some perceived benefit, I guess so. Quite what that benefit could be from lists on a specific web site's development I have no idea. But let's not start a war on this one :)
Well, if you need me to tell you the benefits of open working practices, then what on earth are you doing with Linux? The major problems with community projects are getting enough people motivated to help and avoiding creation of a clique which ceases to be relevant to the community it wants to help. Having the development of the site open helps to make it a community propery and knowing their peers are able to see them curbs the excesses which quickly lead to cliques.
If you want to look at the two main website development projects I'm involved in, you can see this at work. TSW has an announcements mailing list that all potential contributors can join (where the work is dished out -- this is the one that's not archived yet), open drop-in meetings and a public discussion forum. It's run by the editorial team and private emails fly around between various people to co-ordinate and discuss minor points on specific projects, but it's open and appears to be quite efficient. I'll let you know once we relaunch how successful it's being.
IceWM.themes.org was born from a public mailing list http://www.egroups.com/lists/icewm/info.html, is run by the members of a public mailing list (currently quiet as we're all knackered and the site works for now... expect more activity soon) http://cip.physik.uni-bonn.de/icewm-themes/ and all themes.org maintainers appear on IRC in #themes.org on openprojects.net. The higher-level t.o staff lists are closed, but that's not my policy and one I disagree with.
Oddly enough, with two large scale web projects underway, I didn't want to be heavily involved with another, but I thought it was agreed that I'd have odds and ends to contribute, which was fine, as I could read the mailing list from the web archive and email stuff in, but you bounced every single piece of email I ever sent to the list and singularly failed to respond to everything I said. I would have thought that the resignation of James Andrews, a generous perl guru who I have encountered a couple of times, because of your team's behaviour should sound major alarm bells...
LNClique anyone?
It might not happen, but it's a real danger. I'd suggest you open the main mailing list, give public or general access to your CVS along with instructions on how to mirror the site setup and Open Content and Open Source your site. That would be a major step in the right direction, as well as a major talking point come launch day. ["LNC, like Linux itself, is developed in an open way and is freely redistributable..."]
[Probably best to reply to me rather than list on this, as I doubt many people care. I just thought ALUG, who you want to help beta-test the site, might like to know why they're only allowed to see the end product and not how LNC is developed.]
MJR PS: Apologies for poor grammar.</rant> :)
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