Thanks a lot Mo for this exciting experiment! And having two ex-DPLs pressing the big red stop button is not necessarly a bad sign in an ageing project. Often you will see ideas rejected in a very dismissive if not insulting way (for example source-only uploads or HTTPS URLs in /etc/apt/sources.list), and a couple of years later they are mainstream!
What do people do when there is a long thread on debian-devel, debian-project, debian-private or the like? Well, what I do is that I check the first ~6 messages and then cherry-pick 3 or 4 answers deeper in the thread from, for instance Andreas, Russ, Stefano, and maybe also Steve and Branden to broaden my perspectives, and the rest I do not read. It means: people with little reputation have little chance to contribute original points of view to Debian unless they jump on the keyboard as fast as they can, which does not increase the quality of the discussion and biases against people who are in non-mainstream timezones and who are slower to write in English. Our mailing lists were a ground-breaking technological avance in the past that would open Debian to the whole World, but now are they not working exactly against that? I see a big transformative potential for our future discussions: even if a crowd is shouting circular arguments around, we can use AI to reassure participants that original point of views can have good chances to be part of a summary. Taking the effort to contribute is rewarded. This can change Debian considerably. So please, more DebGPT summaries ! Have a nice week-end, Charles
