Web Tech: Forums and Mailing Lists
I’ve written before about lack of transparency from the IGDA Board, but a culture of secrecy exists throughout the IGDA. A lot of the IGDA’s active volunteers in the SIGs and Chapters carry out their business over private mailing lists. Paul Sinnett (a London chapter coordinator) made a pretty compelling point about the issue on a private developers’ forum that I’m a member of. He gave me permission to repost it here.
Yeah I think [secrecy is] more than half the problem with the IGDA as it stands. Over the last few months the quality of life team has been busy putting together a studio survey. Not that anyone would know. All the activity has taken place in private.
There is nothing in any of those messages that could not have been publicly posted on the forums. And yet I’m told that would be impossible. The lack of transparency is exactly why things like Mike Capps’ behind the scenes machinations can go on for years without notice.
[...]
The mailing list disease is spread throughout the organisation. Forcing all the SIGs and chapters to use public forums is the best single thing they could do to improve the association at this point.
Those who say they can’t work without private list groups I would ask to stand down.
As a chapter coordinator and a SIG volunteer, I generally agree with what Paul is saying. So much of what goes on on the mailing lists can happen in public and would add a lot of visibility to the good work being done by volunteers.
There are some issues that I think will need to stay private. When we’re discussing sponsorship fees for meetings of the Boston chapter, I would prefer that those kinds of communications stay in private emails between the chapter coordinators and the sponsors.
I think that fourm-style transparency makes a lot more sense for a SIG than for a Chapter. Chapters are inherently local things. Sometimes the Boston coordinators just meet for dinner to conduct business. Chapters are also generally run by no more than handful of people (our chapter has five coordinators). I think that if you have a small group of people putting together local events, that coordination doesn’t have to take place over a public forum. On the other hand, we often have people approach us and ask if there’s any way they can help with the chapter, and we really don’t have any work for them. But if we handled our business on a forum, I suppose we could say, “Join the forum.” Then they could chime in an offer to help when they see opportunities arise.
SIGs, on the other hand, can involve dozens of active volunteers distributed geographically all over the world. They’re working on things that affect people industry-wide, like white papers and the Global Game Jam. I think that in these cases, more transparency is called for.
What I would like to see is for mailing lists and forums to be merged into one entity, like in a Google Group: you can choose to interact with it as a mailing list or as a forum, but in the end it’s all on the public record. I’d like to see all chapter and SIG *member* activities be on this public forum, along with private lists just for the coordinators of the chapters and SIGs.
Andrew Said,
June 22, 2009 @ 3:20 pm
Luckily, that should be what the new site forces people to do, since they want to shut down all the Pair servers and force all off-site mailing lists onto the IGDA site (obviously a v. good thing).
I’m all for merged functionality. Those who can only deal with send-to-me email can subscribe to what they like, and forums can be made member-specific hidden - so more boring private discussions can take place (for instance, the Preservation SIG people who wrote the white paper - we had a half-dozen on a separate list since it was a lot of going back and forth over editing and boring rubbish like that, which we didn’t want to spam people over - a separate public forum people would have to actively subscribe to would be ideal since the main forum could still get normal conversations going without being interrupted by 20 emails back and forthing over formatting, prose, and edits
).
People have, however, come out against making thing at all public. I’m the opposite, but the Women in Games and Writers SIG’s both have people who don’t want their opinions posted anywhere and seem to think the lists are somehow infallibly private and secret, for some reason. Not quite sure why (some are a bit more level headed and just would like to be asked before being quoted).
Oh, and on the QoL stuff specifically; there’s me responding to someone, and Judy too, here: http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36107
There’s no particular malice involved, although I’d prefer the QoL stuff to be more open if possible since it’s a rather broader topic then SIG specific input.
Possibly put forward to Joda that some new guidelines for Mailing List, Website and Forum usage are required, since it’d help clear up from all the random old material on the old site. He already requested forum input, no doubt is looking for more (and the suggestion of having at *least* the general SIG forums publicly open as possible for topics is a good one, so that, for instance “writing” or “qol” doesn’t go into a private forum).
Darius Kazemi Said,
June 23, 2009 @ 6:27 am
Andrew, that forum link is broken. Damn web tech
Andrew Said,
June 23, 2009 @ 8:09 am
Here it is again:
http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36107
In href form.
Same link, freshly copied - it works for me. It’s just the top post in the Quality of Life forums.
Darius Kazemi Said,
June 23, 2009 @ 8:31 am
Oh, okay, I’ve got it now. I was copying it from my email comment notification, which messed up the formatting. Thanks!
t.h. Said,
July 18, 2009 @ 12:57 pm
I agree that SIGs, and even chapters to an extend (the exception being things that you discussed — money, etc) should work in an open environment.
It is my understanding that even with the new tech, some groups wish to keep their secret playgrounds and that just confuses me.