<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 1:20 PM, m-aaron-r <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:aaron@pd.org">aaron@pd.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Seeing that people are feeling a need to note when their<br>
Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts email list posts are "NOW ON TOPIC" ...<br>
<br>
I'm offering a small and polite request of community concern<br>
that we all consider exercising a little more restraint in creating<br>
or responding to threads that have no real content involving<br>
Linux and FLOSS or even General Computing and the Internet.<br>
<br>
I'm not sure if anyone has noticed my own absence from Off<br>
Topic threads of late, but if I can manage to do it, others may<br>
be able to help in this as well.<br>
<br>
Just a thought.<br>
<br>
peace<br>
aaron<br>
ALE Event Coordinator (etc)<br>
<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br>I'm not proposing this, but just describing how this situation was handled in a workplace of mine. The Unix division had a mailing list to handle communications. Being Unix folks there were a lot of strong opinions (political, cultural and artistic). People in the group would at first devise clever ways to get their political or cultural views out while embedding them in legitimate work related conversations. Pretty soon it erupted into full blown off topic political flame wars (mostly instigated by a right wing member of our group on the one side, and me representing sanity on the other :-)<br>
<br>Rather than lay down the law and ban the off topic discussions a separate list was set up for off-topic banter. Joining was voluntary. The rules were informally stated 1) try to keep it to off work hours and 2) if you don't obey rule number 1 at least keep it to no more than normal water fountain sports conversation and 3) keep all these discussion off the official list.<br>
<br>In some ways it's an extreme solution (another list to manage) but it actually worked pretty well (and in our case probably resulted in more productivity rather than less, since the official list was stripped of the extraneous banter).<br>
<br>Larry<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>"I see design standards that don't tell you how to come up with a good design (only how to write it down), employee evaluation standards that don't help you build meaningful long-term relationships with staff, testing standards that don't tell you how to invent a test that is worth running."<br>
<br> Tom DeMarco<br> Slack<br>