Group memory (was Re: [seul-edu] ebook readers and other such devices...)

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

Adam Cody wrote:
> 
> Doug, or to anyone, would a "scratch" board be a useful item on the website? A
> place where someone can throw up major/minor topic summaries as they are hashed
> out on the mailing list. Problems I've found with mailing lists in the past are
> that topic follow ups tend to be drop and in the end little "conclusions" or
> work come of the matter. This may be premature since I am new to this mailing
> list, so my apologies now if it's inappropriate. I tend to be a fanatic "to do
> list" taker myself since I tend to never follow through with ideas to a concrete
> conclusion without my constant "to do" reminders. Just an idea.
> 
This has been mentioned before on occasion, and we're trying to come up
with a good way to address it.  I'm leaning toward going through our
email archives and assembling the posts on similar topics into a
manageable number of documents that (with judicious editing) will give
the sense of SEUL/edu's thoughts and desires on various things.  These
'sense of SEUL/edu' documents would then be linked to from the main
webpage, and updated whenever there was a need.  This would of course be
a labor-intensive undertaking.  Ian Bicking has started to develop a
list of categories from the subjects of our email archive messages, but
it's still too large to use as our topic outline.  If we do go this
route, I'd like to see no more than 30 (and fewer would probably be
better) of these documents.  Then when a topic comes up, we can all
reread what was said previously and start from that point rather than
continually starting from square one.

If anyone has a better idea on how to accomplish something like this,
we're certainly eager to hear it.  Please jump in!  And if someone wants
to take up the burden of assembling one of these documents when we've
got the categories properly defined, I'll be happy to share out that
task too!

-- 
Doug Loss                 The difference between the right word and
Data Network Coordinator  the almost right word is the difference
Bloomsburg University     between lightning and a lightning bug.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain