Re: HERESY: *ONE* mailing list

On Tue, Jul 25, 2000 at 08:35:04PM -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
> DISCLAIMER: This is just an idea.  It isn't necessarily a good one.

It seems to me that we're all pretty much agreed on the general
"spin-off little short term mailing lists as needed" concept.

And we're also pretty much agreed on the "working groups have goals
and limited lifespan" concept.

That makes the working groups and sub groups sound very similar.

Given that, the issue of "one list" vs "many lists" has a fairly
natural solution: Let them all come and go as needed.

The ``Root List'' exists first and "spawns" (charters) working groups
as needed (determined by the project manager).  The working groups can
themselves spawn sub groups as needed (determined by the wg chair).

Picture:

            Root List
             /  |  \
            /   |   \
           WG  WG   WG
               / \   \
              /   \   \
             SG   SG   SG

Some random thoughts:

You can think of the Root List as the Program Managers own working group.

Working groups will naturally have longer lifespans than sub groups.

Sub groups can't spawn other sub groups
    - the parent working group would do that if the wg chair agrees.

Personally I'd expect no more than 3..6 working groups and each to
    have at most a couple of sub groups active at a time. But it would
    be up to the program manager and wg chairs to decide what's needed.

It may be that one or all wg chairs opt to have no sub groups at all.

Having weekly summaries propagate up the tree and over to an announcement
list would make a lot of sense and help to keep people reasonably focussed.

Cloning the subscription list of the parent to the child and then
making it trivial to unsubscribe (eg a reply to a welcome message)
seems like a good approach.

Tim.