[uf-new] Re: One issue per thread

Manu Sporny msporny at digitalbazaar.com
Fri Feb 27 19:33:05 PST 2009


Tantek Çelik wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny at digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>> Could you please explain why it's better to discourage per-issue threads
>> on the mailing list and instead direct people to the wiki? Why are we
>> discouraging one form of recorded communication over another?
> 
> I have written up a page that explains some of the reasons behind the
> microformats community's preference for using the wiki instead of
> email:
> 
> http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-better-than-email

I've noted various issues on the page. Most notably that the community
shouldn't be forcing a particular workflow on community members. Some of
us can't be distracted by IRC at all times and the people we need to
talk to aren't always on IRC anyway.

There's much more on the wiki page that I've commented on, so I'll leave
it at that, I guess.

> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny at digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>> Tantek Celik wrote:
>>> Please follow-up on the wiki and also one email announcing a batch
>>> of new issues is sufficient. Let's try to keep emails to a minimum
>>> for notification only, and capture discussion/iteration on the wiki.
>> The reason I put each of these in a separate e-mail is to separate
>> issues out into manage-able threads of discussion. I do admit that it's
>> a personal preference, but threaded discussion seems to be a fairly
>> accepted method of working through spec issues.
> 
> Email-centric threaded discussion is fairly accepted method in many
> other standards communities/organizations (W3C, IETF). Per
> http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-better-than-email#tradition , this
> has been different in the microformats community from the start of
> microformats, and deliberately so.

Tradition, in and of itself, is not a valid reason for doing something a
certain way. I don't think it should be listed as a "reason" - distill
out the reasoning that makes the tradition an acceptable practice,
please. More on this on the wiki page.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Scaling Past 100,000 Concurrent Web Service Requests
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/09/30/scaling-webservices-part-1


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