On Monday the 9th of December we organised two simultaneous workshops on open development. One track was about open innovation whereas the other focused on the theme of building an engaged community around open source software projects. I gave a presentation on the latter track about my first experiences with an open source project and explained about the community tools that are essential for open development: a good homepage, a version control system, an issue tracker and mailing lists.
One question at the end of my session was about the mailing lists. I had explained that it is very important to have a publicly accessible mailing list that anybody can subscribe to and that you should ensure that all communication about the project is on the mailing list. The question was about why you should use mailing lists for this and not forums.
Now I always like mailing lists because they form a rather direct way of communication. If you are subscribed you will find messages of the project in your mailbox immediately and provided you are online you are almost instantaneously updated with the latest information. As such it may even lower the barrier of participation for people who start getting involved in the project, because chances are higher that, once subscribed, they never need to go back to the website actively to be updated.
Forums, on the other hand, are always online available, more easily searchable and as such they may be a better resource to find back information for new users. A problem that has been resolved through discussion on the list can be found back easily. As Sebastian Brannstrom of the Symbian Foundation indicated at the discussion, Symbian find that users prefer to use forums rather than lists. Common questions, which have been answered on list, are repeatedly asked on forum.
It is also easier to create different forums for different purposes, whereas you would not easily create a separate mailing list for each topic. Mark Johnson showed during his presentation on his experiences with the Moodle community how they used forums for discussion. Topics can easily be linked to specific issues on the issue tracker, which gives a nice interface to everything related to an issue, whether it’s discussion on a new feature, or how a bug should be solved. Discussion on a mailing list may disappear more easily.
There are some developments that blur the boundary between mailing lists and forums. Steve Lee, from OSS Watch, mentioned Google groups and how they function as a mailing list on one hand, but on the other hand also contain a publicly accessible and archived threaded forum, that allows for searching through specific discussions and can be referenced with a direct url.
What do you think? Should projects have mailing lists, forums, both, or something else? When it is publicly accessible for everyone and easily searchable online, does it really matter which communication channel is used?
I also prefer mailing lists, but I have a few other reasons for doing so:
- I can get at the archives offline. This is important because sometimes I’m working on a train and need an answer to a question that is available in those archives. Of course, this only works once there has been reasonable activity on the list.
- They are more easily searchable (interestingly you note that forums are more easily searchable, so we disagree there). Mail clients allow you to search on many more parameters than a typical forum does and specialist mail archive sites such as http://www.markmail.com provide event more power
- It’s easy to search across multiple mailing lists either using specialist search sites or a web search engine (many forum tools do not make it easy for search engines to index them).
- I can us powerful email filters to ensure that important posts come to my attention. For example, I have filters that flag mails that contain my name - that’s how I can be subscribed to something like 40 project lists yet still answer any email that says something like “I wonder if Ross has any memory of this”.
- I can use those email filters to help manage my information overload from too many lists.
It’s true that users sometimes prefer forums. It’s easier to dip and, ask your question and dive out again (although to be fair subscribing/unsubscribing to mail lists is very easy once you know how). Unfortunately, the ease of dive in/dive out is actually detrimental to most projects. The goal is to build a self supporting community and as you say in this post a mail list makes one feel more involved with the community and therefore more likely to contribute.
It is my considered opinion that forums are exclusive, not inclusive. This is because a new contributor has to actively seek to engage with the community, whereas on a mailing list they can passively watch and learn. It’s kind of like standing on the edge of the dancefloor (mail lists), sooner or later you will be drawn onto the floor my a song you like, but stand outside the building (forums) and you can’t hear the music and will never get to dance.
My main experiences with mailing lists have been in the Hampshire Linux Users Group, and in the (now defunct) NVu project.
In the former, the mailing list certainly seems the best solution. The archives are publicly available (and googleable) online, and since the people on the list are generally very much technically minded, it works well. It also gives great potential for “lurkers” who will (hopefully) one day turn into posters.
With NVu, there was a greater mix of non-technical users as well as developers and so on. I think that the list was archived, but even so the few same questions came around every week. In the end, they set up a forum as well.
I think that the main advantage of the forum is that the search and the threads are all in one place. I means that new members of the community don’t have to know where you go to search the archives, you can see it in front of you.
On balance, I think Steve was right with his suggestion of Google Groups (or a similar system allowing web and email interfaces). This allows the non-technical users to have a familiar interface with features such as search easily discoverable, while having an interface that more technical users might be used to.
Personally is largely a matter of getting notification rather than having to go and check for updates. And for me, that still means getting something in my inbox, rather than RSS, twitter or a social network, which are effectively still ‘pull’ or browse systems.
I agree that in general less techy users seem to prefer the web interface offered by forums and devs prefer text in inbox offered by email.
I agree with Steve easy of notification is key. I’m a member of various ning sites and it continually frustrates me to get an email which says ‘Joe has commented on a discussion in. To see his comment click on this link’. Could they just not show me the message in the email! Consequently, I don’t click through to most of the discussions.
This compares to google groups where not only are discussions I’m involved with emailed to my inbox but I also get an abridge summary of the days posts. Ideal if I want to keep a watching brief on large projects like the Google Wave API.
A solid combination of both seems to be the best from my expirences