[ADMIN] [ANNOUNCE] This list

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
> When the Ubuntu project was started, the sounder list was a place
> where new ideas and fun things like 'Ubuntu sightings' were discussed
> - it was the first mailing list you would read in the mornings.
> However nowadays I don't believe this list is serving its purpose &
> isn't helpful to the project. It only serves to allow a small set of
> people to argue about subjects very tenuously related to Ubuntu, or
> unrelated at all. The Ubuntu project doesn't need this list anymore.

OK, Ubuntu doesn't *need* the list, but I don't see why Ubuntu needs
to delete this list either.

Apparently some people think the list is useful. Some don't. If there
is no cost to maintaining sounder then keeping sounder is at *worst*
harmless. I presume this issue it brought up because there is some
form of cost to maintaining the list. I imagione the direct financial
cost of running sounder is so small as to be negligible.

> If anyone has an opinion / counter proposal I would recommend they
> turn up to the next CC meeting where it can be discussed.

The obvious counter proposal is do nothing. It is hard to suggest a
counter proposal without knowing what problem closing sounder is meant
to solve. A concern raised by Avi is that "list is utterly not what
people who sign up to it are likely to expect". If that is the
concern, we could, for example, create a water-cooler list for
discussions are only  related to Ubuntu in that two or more Ubuntu
users are involved in the discussion (and dump non-software related
discussions there). If there is concern is that the opinions on that
list may be misrepresented as the official opinion of Canonical, we
could perhaps distance water-cooler from Canonical and the Ubuntu
trademark. For example, by not hosting water-cooler on
lists.ubuntu.com

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted