Email is overwhelming, and in someways its the worst possible online group collaboration tool, except all the other ones. (to paraphrase badly)

Partially its my fault, I’m guilty of many of the sins, that Mark Hurst hilights in the latest GoodExperience report, Managing Incoming Email.
I use my inbox as my addressbook, todo list, groupware, etc. (so where are the email enabled address books, and todos? We had a framework for building one at Anyday.com before bought, and shut it down)

But partially Indymedia is trying to do online, consensus style organizing via email, without a defined membership, a largely unsavvy population, and utilizing 400+ mailing lists as a way to keep list size down, working groups intimate, and signal-to-noise up.
We had to write a patch to mailman to allow categorizing of mailing lists, just so that the front page wasn’t totally unmanageable (which it still is)

And I don’t think traditional groupware is the answer, having worked closely with ex-Lotus people (including very senior ex-Lotus people) and having worked on a team to do competive analysis of Groove while at Palm, I’m not impressed by people’s abilities to use groupware outside of a corporate, mandated, environment.

In Indymedia, I’ve pushed people, to use QuickTopic as a way to create quiet places, but transparently, but that solves only some of the problems with threaded discussions.

And I’ve been intriqued by Crit and criticons for a while.

Which is a long of saying, I’m glad to see people playing with email.

Zoe is going opensource. Now if someone could just tell me what it does.

And Microsoft of all people, is doing really interesting work on on heurisitics of threaded discussions. When I ran into Marc Smith at the CPSR conference, he seemed happily in possession of exact recipes, and numbers for identifying ‘productive’ members, and ‘though leaders’ of an online community. And cheefully blase about M$FT plans to stipmine these resources. In fact he even offered to do an analysis of the IMC lists, if we wanted it.