[Martin Taylor 2004.03.30.0956]
On the System Dynamics mailing list today, there was the following
message from the list moderator, Bob Eberlein:
Hi Everyone,
I am pleased to be able to tell you that Tony Kennedy has
successfully put the archives from this mailing list up on a
searchable discussion board. Posts on a subject have been combined
in threads and most of
the email headers stripped out so that you can see just the discussion.
The archives are read only - but there is a an alternative forum at the
same location where you can make postings (you will need to register to
post things).The forum is located at Ventana software support forum - Index page
I plan to keep the mailing list going as a mailing list but this gives
us the opportunity to explore additional discussion opportunities. Where
forum discussion parallels a mailing list discussion it makes sense
to post summaries to the mailing list. I will try to keep a watch to
see if
that is helpful but everyone shold feel free to post such summaries.
I have run (and am running) a couple of discussion forums (Marc
Abrams referred to the current one--ECACS--a few days ago), but I
have not found a way to put up an archive of e-mail messages in the
way described here.
An e-mail list and a discussion forum have different advantages and
disadvantages. Everyone on the list sees e-mails, in all threads (is
this an advantage or a disadvantage?), whereas one has to make a
specific decision to look at a Thread in a forum (or, indeed, to look
at the forum at all). The Forum is in itself an archive, and it is
easy to return to threads that are months old since the last message,
while maintaining the continuity of thought in the discussion. In an
e-mail list, a message not answered within days usually is not
answered at all, or if it is, the readers have lost the sense of what
the discussion was about.
Another advantage of Forums is that it is easy in a Forum to include
pictures and links, which tend to get lost in the ongoing stream of
e-mail.
I'm not prepared to do it, but it seemed to me that if CSGnet were
paralleled by a sibling forum (in addition to the ECACS cousin I
host, which has an overlapping but somewhat different mission),
technical developments in PCT might be more readily advanced, with
less distraction from interpersonal material (which can be kept in an
area of the forum separate from the technical discussions).
Martin