In any technology company of a certain size of age, there is bound to be at least one invitation-only technical mailing list known only to the few who can be trusted to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. One of my challenges, three weeks into working for $BIGCOMPANY, is to find that list, or to arrange for it to find me.
I've worked for a lot of $BIGCOMPANYs and while there may be examples spread around here and there, the invitation-only mailing lists I've seen in big companies are usually specific to some technology or problem domain. These are invitation only because you don't even want to bother everybody with the announcement of the existence, not because you are afraid of who might join.
Think about it for a minute. Do you really think a big companies' technical forums have that much of a problem with noise? I've perused some tech forums at very big companies and people are usually pretty respectful of the medium.
I can think of one example of a noisy technical forum at a particularly big company I've worked at. It wasn't email based, but was pre-Web forum software that had subject threading and keywords, so it was pretty easy to navigate to the meaty discussions with the better contributors.
Usually getting people to share information in a Big Company is a much bigger and more widely recognized problem than trying to keep the noise levels down in tech forums.
I dunno, maybe you've participated in such a mailing list somewhere, but I've not seen it. I have heard of the tech staff at a University doing this, but I got the impression that was a bunch of prima donnas telling each other how cool they were.
Re:I dunno...
dws on 2003-11-15T20:19:27
Do you really think a big companies' technical forums have that much of a problem with noise?Yup. Maybe not all of them, but the ones I've seen have followed a predictable pattern. Some event, which is often a technology shift, drives traffic up. First its signal, and then the noise of people griping that they're not getting their questions answered, following by counter-gripes about attitude, grammar, off-topicness, and so on. Think usenet in the small. Then, for a while, nobody wants to have anything to do with the list.
Re:I dunno...
jordan on 2003-11-16T00:29:32
So, have after these forums broke down into too much noise, did you then find the invitation-only email lists?Re:I dunno...
dws on 2003-11-16T16:27:15
The noise and breakdown is one of the big reasons that invite-only lists spring up.
