Getting Too Many Flex Emails?

[Alex Harui <ah...@adobe.com>]

Hi,

The Apache Flex PMC has received some complaints about really long threads
and the generally high volume of emails associated with trying to follow
the Flex project.  In October, we hit 967 emails on this mailing list
alone.  Add in commits@ with its own 958 emails in October, and 426 emails
from JIRA activity, that’s a lot to keep up with!

We asked the Apache board of directors for advice and they suggested this
chapter in a book [1] which in turn had a link to [2].  My takeaway from
reading these two links is that we should be spending a bit more time
writing our emails in a way that saves the community time.  We need to
provide enough detail without going too long, check our facts, clip out
unnecessary content, even check spelling and grammar.

The net result will hopefully be fewer emails where folks are asking for
more details, or where folks make suggestions based on incorrect, invalid
or obsolete data.  And the hope is that by saving the community time
reading emails, more of you will have time to actually pitch in with
patches, release testing, etc.

It will take some practice for those of use who are the most prolific
email writers to establish new habits. You’ll probably see us prod each
other about “email etiquette” and “community time over individual time”.
That might result in more emails in the short-term, but the long-term goal
is to make following the project more efficient so you can hopefully find
time to contribute in other ways.

If you have suggestions on how we can improve our communications feel free
to voice your opinion on this email list or email me directly.

Thanks,
-Alex

[1] http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#communications
[2] http://bikeshed.com