Fwd: Thursday 5pm at Berkman: Why are Mailing Lists still here, and how can we fix them?

[Jeffrey Warren]

Haha, I ask this question sometimes! How many does public lab have now?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "J. Nathan Matias" <natem...@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 4, 2015 1:45 PM
Subject: Thursday 5pm at Berkman: Why are Mailing Lists still here, and how can we fix them?
To: <civicmedia-...@media.mit.edu>
Cc:

Hi everyone,

Mailing Lists: Why Are They Still Here, What’s Wrong With Them, and How Can We Fix Them? 

Join us Thursday at 5pm at 23 Everett St in the 2nd floor Berkman conference room to hear MIT CSAIL student Amy Zhang share the paper she'll be presenting at CHI, one year on from her visit last year to brainstorm the project. She writes:

Mailing lists have existed since the early days of email and are still widely used today, even as more sophisticated online forums and social media websites proliferate. The simplicity of mailing lists can be seen as a reason for their endurance, a source of dissatisfaction, and an opportunity for improvement. Using a mixed-method approach, we studied two community mailing lists in depth with interviews and surveys, and surveyed a broader spectrum of 28 lists. We report how members of the different communities use their lists and their goals and desires for them. We explore why members prefer mailing lists to other group communication tools. But we also identify several tensions around mailing list usage that appear to contribute to dissatisfaction with them. We conclude with design implications, discussing ways to alleviate these tensions while preserving mailing lists’ appeal. 

Amy Zhang is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at MIT CSAIL, advised by Prof. David Karger and a member of the Haystack Group and User Interface Design Group at MIT. She conducts research on designing, analyzing, and building systems to improve discourse, collaboration, and understanding on the web. She also works on computational analyses of large-scale social data to understand topics in the social sciences.

Email: a...@mit.edu

Website: http://people.csail.mit.edu/axz/

Twitter: @amyxzh

-- 

J. Nathan Matias : MIT Media Lab : Berkman Center : (001)857 277 3397 : @natematias : blog

[Liz Barry]

Oh this is a great topic for us!

we happen to have 

* 3 top level lists (english, spanish, portuguese)

* 11 topical lists (tools, working groups, barnraising)

* 17 place lists, some of these are nested tho

the full list, including some discontinued or merged is here, an all time high record of ~36: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlY4Tg28DhosdGlzd0RCaFdGYXNWR0pHZEV3R0lCV2c#gid=0

--

txt only: +1 336-269-1539

@lizbarry

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