Dear Amy,
This is really a new thread. It has to do list usability rather than respect, so I’ve changed the header.
Google Groups, LinkedIn, and many other lists offer systems. One or two focus specifically on design research, and many focus on design. I don’t find them especially helpful — they are difficult to track, and despite the features for immediate usability, they do not work well for long-term research conversations. They do indeed have high readership — so do some of the LinkedIn Groups. High readership is not the main criterion for a research community.
JISCMAIL was specifically designed for academic communities. They switched to ListServ from the old Mailserv system. There are other decent systems for academic groups and research communities, but they are not free, and only an organisation such as JISCMAIL or its counterparts in other nations can afford them and maintain them with the extensive archives that make such lists useful.
If you feel that Google offers potential benefits, why not establish such a list and trial it? Rob Curedale launched a design research list on LinkedIn. Some of us subscribe there as well as here. I find the conversations to be far more terse, and the system is difficult to use, but interesting things pop up from time to time.
If I were to try another system, I would continue to subscribe and read here. So far, other lists and other systems have not managed to generate rich, durable conversations of the kind that have taken place here for the past fifteen years, and none of them offers the comprehensive, searchable archives that make this list so valuable to researchers and research students. Moreover, private owners such as Google or LinkedIn have no ongoing obligation to users. Such services can vanish overnight, and when you use these services, you agree to their terms and limits.
JISCMAIL is a publicly funded service of the United Kingdom. It may well vanish or change as a result of government policy decisions, but this seems to me unlikely in a world where the UK remains one of the world’s leading nations for university education and research.
It is my belief that this list is highly usable. There are open questions on list culture, behaviour, and other issues. The usability of the system and its stability as a public resource are another matter entirely.
Experiments are always worth trying. Rob has had immense success with his Linked projects — with over 100,000 subscribers, his audience is far greater than the audience for PhD-Design. Google might be worth a go. At the same time, PhD-Design remains valuable for those who find this system usable.
To quote Morgan Freeman in Thick as Thieves, “I’m just saying, is all.”
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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Amy Cheng wrote:
—snip—
Perhaps it's time to rethink the usability of the list. IMHO google groups tend to have high readership and work well. Members get digests emailed to them every so often with new topics, and can choose which subjects to reply too (privately or publicly) pertaining to what is relevant to them. Given that there is such a diversity of subscribers perhaps this is a great way to practice our user research and redesign the way we share our expertise and wisdom?
—snip—
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