Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think

[Evan]

Coincidentally, Bryce recently posted a couple of blog posts dealing with
"Me too" storms on launchpad [1]+[2] which are related.

I don't claim to be an expert on this, but as I see it the problem comes
down to channels. Various channels of communication can hold different
numbers of active participants before they become flooded, and conversation
becomes impossible. It is possible to have only a couple of people on the
same phone connection (unless some of them are in the same room, which is
somewhat different), and quite a few more on irc. Even more are possible on
a mailing list because it becomes easier to ignore threads which you aren't
participating in (especially with gmail's thread view). However, even
mailing lists become saturated with too many users.

The two obvious ways to scale are to make better channels, which can hold
more people without saturation, and/or to make more channels. To my mind, we
would be best served by making more (nested?) channels, with a sort of
meta-channel for each category, which is only for directing users to the
right subchannel. I know this sounds sort of confusing, so let me provide an
example based on the ubuntu forums.

A brand new user is having trouble getting sound out of their speakers, so
they go to the forums. They're not familiar with the way they work, so they
post in the "Something isn't working" metaforum. Someone who knows a bit
about the forum system gives them a brief explanation and conveniently moves
their post down a level into the Audio subforum. Again, someone in the Audio
metaforum (who presumably knows something about audio) tells them it's a
driver issue, and moves their post a level deeper into the Drivers subforum,
where someone who knows about the audio driver stack picks it up and helps
them. If they can't solve it, perhaps they realize it's more a mixing issue,
and moves the thread sideways to the appropriate location. More experienced
users can, of course, go straight to the proper subforum if they know where
it is.

The idea is that someone who knows a lot about audio drivers can hang out
down there, and only has to deal with pertinent questions. Someone who
doesn't have specialized knowledge but likes helping/teaching can hang out
higher up and direct new users to the right subforum. I have no idea if this
would work, I just whipped it off the top of my head, and I have no idea how
it would work with systems like Launchpad or the mailing lists, but it's at
least an interesting concept. Something else to ponder.

Just my two cents,
Evan

[1] http://www2.bryceharrington.org:8080/drupal/me-too-storms
[2] http://www2.bryceharrington.org:8080/drupal/me-too-storms-solutions
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