Joshua Allen Holm

Authored Comments

I'm actually letting one of my professional memberships lapse because the members only listserv has dried up in favor of twitter discussions. (The private listserv was one of the few member benefits that I used.) Previously, they used the listserv to collaborate on event planning and the future vision of the organization. The very act of communicating is collaborating, not everyone needs something like redmine.

<em>Nothing is undoable (we can even manage things with pen and paper and still attain the result). The difference is how readily the information is available.</em>
Correct, and there is no reason that newer tools, that improve in other areas, should make data less accessible (i.e. make things harder to access) than the tools from the "þe olden days" of the internet.

<em>With a proper project collaboration one doesn't (or shouldn't?) need to search, download, and do things with the archives.</em>
So no one should ever need to write a history of a project based on how things developed? How things happened is just as important and the end result, and modern tools need to make things as easy to do so as the tools that came before them.

As someone with some interest in making sure (important & public) digital communications aren't completely ephemeral, I still prefer email listservs to twitter, forums without user accessible data export options, and the like. I can search, download, and do things with the archives from listservs, if I, for example, want to do historical research on a project (some of us actually need "years and years of emails"). I have a much harder time doing using some of the other communication/collaboration methods. I can still find emails I sent in 2005 to a particular project's listserv, but finding a twitter discussion about the same project from last year is a chore, if it is possible at all. Twitter's search bills itself as "See what's happening right now" and even the advanced search doesn't include an option to search for things from a specific time frame. Exporting your own data isn't the same thing as getting all the data and being able to search through everyone's comments on a topic, and the Library of Congress's twitter archiving effort is still just getting off the ground. Newer forms of communication and collaboration aren't always better.