[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] New list spin-off?

[From: Michael Wiktowy]

On 1/31/07, quim.gil at nokia.com <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
> This list is growing and sometimes (like this month) is difficult to follow.
>
> What about finding a specific development area that could be discussed in a
> separate list, leveraging the weight of this one? Contributors interested in
> that area could collaborate better. A list specialized in a specific topic
> would be also easier to join and follow for the maemo at Nokia developer
> working on that topic.
>
> Please have your say.

I have seen this sort of thing happen in countless mailing lists.
People get overwhelmed by the volume of mails that don't interest them
and proposing splitting up the lists. However, more often than not, it
ends up creating a lot of confusion and cross-posting that actually
ends up increasing the overall traffic and making people less happy.

If you want to do this, make very very sure that you are splitting off
a subject segment that has a very clear line between it and what was
existing. If there is fuzziness then people with questions are just
going to migrate where they get answers; no matter how inappropriate
the list. Also, you will get into situations where users get
ping-ponged between lists where each list is telling them to go to the
other.

The best thing to do would be to just set up some personal email
filters that highlight the topics that you are interested in or the
people that you respect the most and not worry about reading every
email. It would be good if somebody at Nokia was assigned as the lucky
catch-all person to make sure nothing important gets ignored by the
other devs. There was a list of current issues being released weekly
(I forgot specifically who was doing that) that I thought was great
but I haven't seen it recently. I could understand how that would be a
lot of work and not be very conducive to making friends though ;]

/Mike