Channels for community communications

Happily, the days of broadcasting software releases over modem-based connections are long behind us. But the free software community still relies on electronic mail for the bulk of its communications, despite the fact that a great many alternatives have become available. Email has a lot of advantages: we have developed a lot of tools for working with it (complaints about the quality of free email clients notwithstanding), it works well for multi-sided communications, it is distributed and can be dealt with offline, it is easily searched, and it is readily managed and archived on non-proprietary sites. It is not surprising that email has been the tool of choice for so long, especially when one looks at some of the alternatives.

Recently, your editor received a grumpy communication (via email, naturally) from a prominent community member who was unhappy about a recent quotes of the week article that included a quote posted on the Google+ site. Posting to links on Google+ legitimizes it as a valid place for community discussions, your editor was told; it makes it more likely that more conversations - perhaps more useful ones than the one chosen by LWN - will move to that site. And this was seen as a bad thing.

There are certainly reasons to be concerned about engaging in community discussions on a site like Google+. The site is corporate-owned, making it subject to all of the usual types of pathological corporate behavior, in the present or in the future. Its owner will make use of the content of messages and the whole "circles" structure for targeted advertising and any number of other purposes. Governments seem to feel free to help themselves to the information held by these sites at will. There are no tools to help readers deal with messages on the site, no RSS feeds, and no ability to read messages offline.

But the biggest complaint of all seemed to be that when sites like Google+ (or even LWN) host conversations of interest, they spread those conversations out and make it harder to keep up with what is being said. The result is a more fragmented community with groups that no longer communicate with each other and with people who are left in the dark about important discussions and decisions. It would be better, this correspondent said, to improve the mailing list experience if need be and keep the useful discussions there.

Your editor understands these concerns and is all for improving the email experience whenever possible. But he is less clear on whether it has ever been possible to concentrate community communications into a single channel, or whether it is a desirable goal.

Consider, for example, the venerable IRC channel. IRC is clearly an important part of how members of our community work together. But IRC, too, works poorly offline; it also often - and often by design - lacks a permanent record. Extracting information from IRC logs when they are available is a tedious exercise at best. IRC involvement can also be incompatible with actually getting work done, so some people find that they need to avoid it. IRC, in other words, is a channel that is available to parts of the community part of the time, but it has its value anyway.

An even more exclusive resource is the famed conference hallway track, where a lot of real work gets done. Your editor's job would be much facilitated by readily-accessible logs of conference hallway (and pub) conversations; the "quotes of the week" section, in particular, would benefit mightily. But no such logs exist, and that is certainly for the best. There is also a lot of valuable conversation to be found in vast numbers of bug trackers, patch trackers, weblogs, retail site comment areas, and, sadly, forum sites.

In other words, community discussions are already widely fragmented. The key is communicating important decisions back to the wider group and making people aware of useful discussions. Often that can be achieved with an email to a prominent development list; one might also hope that sites like LWN can help in this regard. Indeed, one might argue that pointing to something interesting on Google+, rather than encouraging fragmentation of our community, actually serves to help pull it back together.

That said, the other concerns about a platform like Google+ remain. If anything important was ever posted on Google's "Wave" or "Knol" platforms, it will disappear early next year. The same fate could certainly befall discussions on Google+. That platform also excludes anybody who is unwilling to provide yet more information to Google about his or her activities and connections on the net. Google+ might serve as a sort of stand-in for a conference hotel bar, but it is not suitable as a piece of significant community infrastructure. One could name any of a number of other proprietary platforms that are equally unsuited, if not more so.

It seems that there is a place in our lives for a service with which we can post updates on our development projects, air travel horror stories, silly cat pictures, desktop environment flames, lazyweb requests, cooking experiments, new techno-toys, and musings on how Cher songs relate to the harsh life of NMI watchdog handlers. What we seem to be missing is the ability to create such a platform for ourselves and, crucially, to get a critical mass of people to give it a try. Even back in the USENET days, we demonstrated that we can create distributed communications services when we set our minds to it. Someday we'll solve that problem again for the contemporary net; until then, we're limited to the channels that exist, some of which are not all we would like them to be.