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Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:23:12 +0100
Subject: keeping traffic on this list manageable
From: mls@pooteeweet.org (Lukas Kahwe Smith)

Hi,

So some core developers as well as lurking end users have noted that  
the traffic on this list prevents them from being able to follow this  
list. This is obviously a huge problem since this mailinglist is  
supposed to be our primary discussion and decision making tool.

I had a chat about this with Zoe, Stephan (of symonfy fame) and Pierre  
at IPC. In this discussion I got the following idea (note that I am  
listing the names here in order to credit them in this idea, not  
because they necessarily endorse it):

What if we have two lists for internal discussions. One which is just  
as open as the current one and one that is moderated. People with  
commit karma for php-src (and maybe also phpdoc) get unmoderated  
access. However this obviously creates the issue that the community  
and newcomers will have a much harder time to get in contact with the  
core development team. As the list is moderated, it would require  
people to manually allow the given posts. This creates a bottleneck  
which would also create considerable work for those moderators.

Here I come to the key part of my idea. We would allow every PHP  
usergroup to also appoint one person that gets unmoderated access to  
the list. This enables members of the usergroup to feed their ideas  
via that person directly to the list, taking load of the list  
moderators and ensuring that things a given UG deem important are not  
lost in this process. Furthermore this intermediate step would serve  
to throttle the traffic and make the numbers of posters (their writing  
style and expertise) more easily transparent to other posters (but  
more importantly to the readers). I am sure this will help reduce  
misunderstandings and more importantly result in a more friendly tone  
(its just natural for people to feel overwhelmed by too large a crowd).

As a side bonus, we strengthen UGs around the world. This will  
hopefully lead to better communication channels between internals and  
active community members. It will certainly ease the organization of  
future testfests (or docfrenzy's) as we will then have contact people  
to talk to as well as more of an incentive for people to join their  
local UG. I would not want to try to come to a closed definition of  
what constitutes a UG. Lets just create an interface were people can  
register their UG and manage the email address for the contact person  
(and maybe a few other things like their website etc). People can  
create physical UGs as well as virtual UGs for all I care. If we  
notice that this liberal approach gets abused (people faking UGs to  
get direct access and more voting rights) we can decide on taking some  
protective measures. But for now lets just assume that everybody in  
the community understands the beauty of such a liberal approach.

---

Just like in my previous email. Please all try to focus on sending  
high quality replies to this list. So lets all restrain ourselves and  
wait a bit longer than usual before replying. Maybe someone else will  
already make the point you want to make and in the mean time you can  
think things over and optimize your message.

regards,
Lukas Kahwe Smith
mls@pooteeweet.org

PS: I have published the above text as an RFC on the wiki .. http://wiki.php.net/rfc/managinglisttraffic