The following are my personal views. 1. Many ILUGC members have fear on posting to mailing list. They have told many times to me in person. They may have to learn many guidelines. They feel that facebook has no guidelines.
2. They are already in lot of facebook groups and they are contributing a lot. Tons of questions/answers, news sharing, event sharing/contributing happening there. 3. It is very tough to see the low contributions from the people contributing the mailing list, for any of the "Call for X". Call for speakers, Call for SFD demo stalls etc. 4. We need more events, more participants, more volunteers which the list lacks. 5. What if we have a facebook group and via it we get more questions/answers/interactions/events/participation/volunteers as it seems very easy for many potential people. There are chances for good things to happen. Why not to explore. 6. Yes. The mailing list may slowly become inactive. Still it will be a choice of people to ask question in mailing list or facebook group. 7. I am too not a fan of facebook groups. see my thoughts about them here. https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/bid-adieu-to-facebook-technical-groups/ 8. Yes. Facebook discussions can not be searched/archived. In the age of internet, the support we give is very less, while most of the content is available on various forums/blogs/stackoverflow etc. Do we need archiving? How are we using ilugc mail archives? IRC is being used by many technical groups. Do we have all the IRC talks archived? Still we can reach them in IRC and get answered or give answers. 9. We need more physical volunteers than the online contributors to conduct local events and meetings. With the current active mailing list strength, we can not conduct much events. Ex: only 3 SFD stall submission till two days ago. Once I shared them in other facebook groups, we got 12 now. If we have more volunteers, we can have separate teams for managing meetings, events, website, workshops etc. Hope we can give a try with new facebook group. Community should be for people and by the people. To get more events and activities, we need more people. Let us reach them via one another medium. If this experiment fails, no harm. Still we will be having the mailing list running. -- Regards, T.Shrinivasan My Life with GNU/Linux : http://goinggnu.wordpress.com Free E-Magazine on Free Open Source Software in Tamil : http://kaniyam.com Get CollabNet Subversion Edge : http://www.collab.net/svnedge _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
