Sounder mailing list etiquette and future direction

John McCabe-Dansted gmatht at gmail.com
Fri Dec 4 17:31:55 GMT 2009


On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:09 PM, Elizabeth Krumbach <lyz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Ubuntu and the Code of Conduct seek to address this, which is why some
> of these personal attacks, flame wars and bike shedding is not welcome
> on Sounder (or any Ubuntu lists, -users was brought up in this
> discussion as well and we in the CC are aware of this behavior there
> too and are working to address it).

Since ubuntu-devel-discuss was formed most of the productive
discussion moved there, and sounder has become a dumping ground
various and bikeshedding and unproductive discussions that occur on
other lists.

If this practice is continued we could rename "sounder" to "bikeshed".
It is my understanding that bike shedding isn't inherently prohibited
by the CoC like personal attacks/flamewars are. If some members think
that their debates is still productive, then there seems to be little
harm in continuing the debate on a list for that specific purpose.
Occasionally they may be right and actually produce something useful.
Additionally it is in some sense more polite to ask members to move
the debate elsewhere than demand they stop outright.

My feeling is that sounder isn't quite the same as bikeshed, for
example discussing possible changes to the CoC or marketing strategies
isn't directly related to development of Ubuntu but does belong
somewhere, and that somewhere is currently sounder. I would imagine
that splitting "bikeshed" off from sounder result in fairly low volume
list with little flamebait.  Bikeshed may be better implemented as a
forum though, so as to make it easier to move discussions there from
other lists.

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted



More information about the sounder mailing list