[ale] Request to Reduce Off Topic Posts

[Larry Johnson]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 1:20 PM, m-aaron-r <aaron at pd.org> wrote:

> Seeing that people are feeling a need to note when their
> Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts email list posts are  "NOW ON TOPIC" ...
>
> I'm offering a small and polite request of community concern
> that we all consider exercising a little more restraint in creating
> or responding to threads that have no real content involving
> Linux and FLOSS or even General Computing and the Internet.
>
> I'm not sure if anyone has noticed my own absence from Off
> Topic threads of late, but if I can manage to do it, others may
> be able to help in this as well.
>
> Just a thought.
>
> peace
> aaron
> ALE Event Coordinator (etc)
>
>
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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 :-)

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.

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).

Larry

-- 
"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."

                                     Tom DeMarco
                                      Slack
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