[Reader-list] What ails the Sarai Reader List?

[Kiran Jonnalagadda]

On 27-Aug-05, at 3:13 PM, punam zutshi wrote:

> I want to as a 'consumer' want to answer things of concern to me:
> Is the load of the Sarai Reader List too high? No.
> Does the flood of e mails by month end bother me? No.
> How does one deal with the list? Does one want it more orderly
> accessible fashion? I see little problem in the exercise of a degree
> of judgement and selection.Why should deletion of messages be a
> problem? I would like to receive whatever is posted and do the
> screening myself.

Dear Punam,

Thanks again. One of my concerns with migrating of the Reader List to  
a new platform was that there would always be users who liked the  
existing setup and aren't convinced about the benefits of the new. As  
you have expressed, I was right about at least this bit. :-) However,  
not everyone is happy with the list's current state, and whatever  
solution is adopted must be able to satisfy both parties adequately.

I was at Sarai when I made the last post and had discussed the issue  
with Vivek and Monica. I'm in Bangalore now and continuing the  
conversation over email. In my proposal (December) I had mentioned  
that I was looking for a community to test my observations with.  
Vivek suggested the Reader List. Sarai has been cooperative and  
accommodating with this process, and I must thank them for this.

I do not have a solution at hand. So far, I've only identified  
patterns in communications in different communities. I haven't  
studied them all yet. For example, Ryze is a social networking site,  
much like Orkut, LinkedIn, Tribe, Multiply and a gazillion others,  
but Ryze has a buzz to it that the others lack. It's not that Ryze  
works because it has all the people -- Orkut is also heavily  
populated. There is something about the Ryze interface that makes it  
tick, that I haven't quite understood yet.

How am I going to adapt these observations to an email based list  
without disrupting the existing functioning of the list? I don't  
know. But it's a worthy challenge, don't you think?

-- 
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://www.pobox.com/~jace