ADMIN: More Membership Musings (Oh Boy!) (MEM)

[Cindy C.]

Tom wrote:

>I suggest that we set a deadline for ourselves in this case of "no
>more than a week" to decide. 

Excellent, idea, Tom.


>Can we send a Special Notice or something? 

Sure.  Works for me.  We do need the list of people we are
considering, though.

>One way or the 
> other, then the, um, considerees will know where they stand. As far 
> as I'm concerned (and having heard nothing truly negative on any of 
> them) they've all got my vote. Their names are Michelle, Carolyn,
>and Kelley. Right? ;-)

Well, there are those three, plus a couple of others, IIRC.  I'd like
to see us deal with all of them at once, myself.

FWIW, I still have significant issues with Michelle's candidacy.

> SIDE NOTE:
> On Carolyn's project - I think it's a good idea, and having been 
> combing through archives for the last week or so, I'm convinced that 
> she's right about how fluidly work would go with a hundred members. 


Mmmm, I like Carolyn's idea as well in theory, but I don't think it
should be the work of this group.

A bit of history, then.

<waits for exasperated groans to die down>

When we first began to catalogue posts in October (dang, was that a
whole *year* ago?), Elkins and I (in consultation with a few FAQ
members off-list) gave some thought to the idea of bringing in a huge
wave of new members to help with cataloguing.  This, it was thought,
might make things go more quickly.  

In the end, we decided not to expedite the cataloguing by drastically
increasing membership (choosing to bring in fewer people but making
sure we were confident that they were very bright and excellent
writers), for a host of reasons.  

First, as those who catalogued know, the work may *seem* easy, but it
wasn't.  It required some brain power; there were many judgments to be
made.  

Second, the more people we added, the greater the variation in how
posts would be catalogued, which would lead to an internally
inconsistent end product.  

Third, a stroll through the archives shows that even having a small
number of people cataloguing resulted in some *serious* spikes in
message volume on this list, and much confusion.  

Fourth, assembling a large team of members who will have sustained
interest in the community (defined as getting to work, doing what they
promised to do, and sticking around without unexplained months-long
absences) is not easy.  The burn-out rate in our community can be
pretty high, and the follow-through rate can be rather low at times. 
It would be a shame if huge hunks of the project didn't get completed
because people just became bored and wandered off.

For those reasons, I think it would be better for Carolyn's project to
be a separate Yahoo list with its own membership.

> But I don't think that all one hundred of them have to be members of 
> this group. We (or maybe MEG) could simply create a second group of 
> people to work on it. Anyone (including us) could be involved; but I 
> don't think it has to be an FAQ thing, per se. It really sounds like 
> a true "community" sort-of thing, you know, that every member of 
> hpfgu should get the chance to work on.

This would be OK by me.  They can work under the guidance of MEG, I think.

Frankly . . . 

We haven't exactly been making rapid-fire progress on FAQ work as it
is.  I think expanding the scope of our work would be a mistake at
this point.

Of course . . . 

There's always the chance that some or all of our prospective FAQ list
members (Kelley, Michelle and Carolyn) would want to get that other
group off the ground rather than join us here?  Something to consider
. . . 

Cindy