[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Brett Cannon]

On Sun, 31 Jan 2016 at 08:19 Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas at gmail.com>
wrote:

> To be clear, I'm not on python-dev and am not advocating we replace that
> list with Discourse.
>
> I'm just making the case for why Discourse would be a good candidate for
> the other discussion venues we've been talking about in this thread (e.g.
> packaging, python-ideas), where people are open to trying out a new medium.
>
> The basic idea is that investing in a better medium and better tooling
> fosters better discussions, which benefits Python the community and
> ultimately also Python the code base. I wouldn't call that a circus
> activity.
>
> But then again, I'm relatively new to the Python community; perhaps most
> people on here find this kind of meta-discussion unproductive.
>

It should happen on occasion, just not regularly. :)

Keeping an open source project running is part technical, part social
(which makes it part political :). That social bit means having to
occasionally evaluate how we are managing our communication amongst not
just long-time participants but also new ones. This means we have to
sometimes look at what kids in university are  using in order to entice
them to participate (heck, even high school at this rate). For instance,
Barry has mentioned NNTP as part of his solution to managing his mail
relating to Python. But go into any university around the world and ask
some CS student, "what is Usenet?" -- let alone NNTP -- and it's quite
possible you will get a blank stare. This is why I don't call it
comp.lang.python anymore but  python-list at python.org (same goes for IRC,
but it's probably known a lot more widely than Usenet). What this means is
we occasionally have to evaluate whether our ways of communicating are too
antiquated for new participants in open source and whether they are no
longer the most effective (because old does not mean bad, but it does not
mean better either), while balancing it with not having constant churn or
inadvertently making things worse. Toss in people's principled stances on
open source and it leads to a heated discussion.

For instance, people have said they don't want to set up another account.
But people forget that *every* mailing list on mail.python.org requires its
own account to post (I personally have near a bazillion at this point). And
while the archives and gmane give you anonymous access to read without an
account, so does Discourse or any of the other solutions being discussed
(no one wants to wall off the archives or make it so we can't keep a hold
of our data in case of another move).

It's the usual issue of having to get down to the root of the issue as to
why people would want to stay with the mailing list vs. why others would
want to switch to Discourse. Finding out the fundamental reasons and taking
out the emotion of the discussion is usually the key to helping solve this
sort of grounded discussion (at which point you can start ignoring those
who can't remove the emotion).

And in the case of people worrying about bifurcating the discussions, the
python-ideas mailing list would simply be shut down to new email and its
archive left up to prevent a split in audience if we do end up changing
things up.


>
>
> On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 10:48 AM Stefan Krah <skrah.temporarily at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas at ...> writes:
>> > If this sounds interesting to you, I recommend reading through the
>> Discourse trust levels to get a good sense of how Discourse views
>> community
>> building. It’s really well thought out, IMO, and is informed by the
>> authors’
>> experience building Stack Overflow.
>>
>> It does not sound interesting at all -- Python development is increasingly
>> turning into a circus, with fewer and fewer people actually writing code.
>>
>>
>> Stefan Krah
>> _______________________________________________
>> Python-ideas mailing list
>> Python-ideas at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
>> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Python-ideas mailing list
> Python-ideas at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20160131/f439639d/attachment-0001.html>