[pp.int.general] Communication Plan

[Zbigniew Łukasiak]

>From the yesterdays board meeting:

"""
In order to improve communication, and overall visibility, an action
plan needs to be developed. The present task is: - an open discussion
regarding on the ways to improve the communication channels - a
virtual workshop which aims to deliver a comprehensive communication
plan as of next PPI Board meeting for review and acceptance. The
communication plan will incorporate the feedback presented by Members
during the GA as well as the outcome of several bilateral discussions.
"""

http://wiki.pp-international.net/PPI_Minutes_2016_07_31#11_-_Communication_plan_draft

Lets start the discussion.


I have written many times at this mailing list that we need some kind
of moderation - because the list in current state repels people. I
have talked to many previously active participants in the discussions
here - and not many of them still read the list. We need a way to
improve the quality of the discussions here.

It is not yet decided if we want to keep the mailing list or maybe if
we want to move the discussions to a forum - but I think we can afford
to have both.

What I think is needed for the list:

1. More equal voice for all participants - so that it will not be
possible that one user is flooding the list with emails. This can be
done by restricting the amount of emails each participant can send to
the list in a given time (for example to one daily or two weekly).
This rule can be enforced automatically and it would be impartial.
This will mean that we'll need some ways to guard against sockpuppets.

2. We need to encourage people to put some effort into writing the
emails - so that they are written clearly and easy to understand.
Again limiting the frequency of emails each user can send to the list
should improve the situation in this regard as well. But it would
probably be not enough. Maybe we need some guides - like
http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html ? Or maybe we need to some out of
the list feedback mechanism?

3. Maybe we'll need moderation (from time to time?) to weed out the
extremely vicious. But this will be hard to do well. We'd need some
concrete guidelines for the moderators, decide who will oversee the
moderators etc. I have not seen anything really vicious at this
mailing list so far - even Antonio would be bearable if he was limited
to two emails a week - but this might change in the future if we make
the list more popular.


One note on rules and norms.

We can guide/force people to act in a way we wish they do in three ways:
- by limiting what they can do (by automatic enforcement - for example
making the list server limit the amount of emails each email address
can send to the list per a given time period)
- by making rules - do what we want or otherwise we'll do something to
you (if you troll the list the moderator can remove you from it)
- by norms - which are like guidelines describing what we want you to
do, but don't have any explicit enforcement mechanism

Automatic enforcement is the most impartial, easiest to enforce and
least flexible, norms are the least impartial, hardest to establish
and enforce - but the most flexible, rules are somewhere in between.

We'll probably need all three tools.

Cheers,
Zbigniew