Re: Has cap-talk effectively moved to other media?

On 22 May 2014 18:18, William ML Leslie <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 22 May 2014 17:13, Rob Meijer <rmeijer-qWit8jRvyhVmR6Xm/[email protected]> wrote:
>> I recently noticed that many people on this list are now extensively using
>> Google Groups for discussions that used to be posted here on cap-talk. The
>> friam group appears to be significantly more active than cap-talk these
>> days. Has cap-talk effectively moved to Google Groups, and should we all
>> follow?
>
> I have been wondering the same thing, althought I'm not sure if I like
> the idea of groups.

That said, google groups has four nice properties:

* Identity: It is easy to see if you should belong to a group or not,
by examining the name.  'friam', for example, suggests that this is a
close nit group that meets for coffee on Friday morning to discuss
distributed computing problems.

* Existence of inverses:  A group needs to contain people who
effectively argue different sides.  For example, our recent discussion
(on cap-talk) about resource management had Daira Hopwood and Rob
Meijer take interesting and different angles.

* Associativity:  It's easy to go from knowing one person in the group
to knowing most everyone.

* Closure:  hopefully, all questions are eventually answered.

Groups have an operator that maintains these properties, and a set of
people that can be maintained to preserve them.

However, I wonder if google semigroups or google rings might be a
better platform.

-- 
William Leslie

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