List Guidelines

[Ben Oakes]

Hi all,

I'd like to take a moment to chime in about the recent activity on the
list. Although Google says I'm the list owner and moderator, I've
always thought of this mailing list as being owned and curated by the
members of NewHaven.rb.

We have some really great people in this group. I'm very pleased with
the amount that we've grown over the last year, and the amount of
people that regularly come to our meetups and participate. Everyone
has their own level of involvement, and we're always happy to welcome
anyone who wants to take part.

That said, this isn't the first time job-related emails have created a
lot of discussion. However, the general consensus seems to be that
our email volume is currently quite low and really doesn't require
much policing.

Looking back, I see the list emails falling into a few categories:

* Ruby discussion with your peers

We have a community at our disposal to learn from. Take advantage of
it; it's a great thing. A lot of this community learning happens in
meetups right now, but keep this list in mind between events. Thanks
to everyone for making this happen (e.g., the recent "Rails Workflow"
topic).

* Event notices and questions

I'm posting most of the NewHaven.rb meetups right now, but all of us
appreciate community involvement. For example, several people are
awesome about letting us know about other local events, and many
others have contributed greatly to making meetups such as the October
Lightning Talks happen successfully.

* Local job listings, etc

Although many of us are happily employed, this list is really one of
the few good places for local Ruby jobs to be announced. As discussed
in the past, local roughly means "in Connecticut", but more often
means "close to New Haven". I'm very proud to say that members have
happily found jobs through this list. If local Ruby job postings
start to happen more than once every week or two, we can (1) celebrate
because that's awesome for our community and (2) revisit filtering,
other lists, etc.

Please reply if you disagree with any of the above. I'd like to think
that this is reasonable and doesn't require much change to the more-or-
less tacit rules we've been following. And to that end, I'll make
this an aptly-described "sticky" topic on the Google Groups page so it
can be easily found.

So, to the point others are making: yes, let's keep this list a great
resource for all of us and help it grow. That includes being kind to
each other, of course.

And be careful with that "reply all" button. :)

My best,

Ben