Mailing Lists over RSS
August 28th, 2003Next generation mailing lists are a subject close to my heart. Wedging our ongoing work and conversations into the confines of email has been convient over the years for leveraging an installed platform, but that doesn’t necessarily make it an appropiate fit.
A lot of work needs to be put into how to facilitate meaningful conversations that maintain state, how to make sure conversations are added to the institutional memory, how to do online descision making, etc, etc.
What is the upside?
One interesting thought expirement going on right now is, “what do we gain if we switch to publishing mailing lists via RSS”.(not to be confused with merely making lists available via RSS)
Chuq says, subscriptions are an artifact and non-essential, easily replaced as an authentication mechanism with challenge/response. (Something the W3C lists are already experimenting with, and some newsgroups like the comp.lang.perl.* have been doing for years.)
Brent riffs on password protected RSS as a replacement for email an idea that sounds very similar to the email over freenet ideas I heard a few years back.
Or maybe the whole idea of mailing lists is dead? (actually I disagree with that, lists create a space, a space has community, investment, and social norms, something a purely personal aggregated view can’t replicate)
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