Re: [-empyre-] The social dynamics of lists

[marcos weskamp <mail@marcosweskamp.com>]

Hello everyone,

My name is Marcos Weskamp, I'm an interaction designer currently living 
in Tokyo. For some time already the abstraction representation and 
visualization of unseen patterns in large data sets has been of deep 
interest for me.
In the past I've worked making very simple visualizations of mailing 
lists. I always found the topic very interesting since in my opinion 
mail clients today lack indeed features that will let us understand in a 
more simple way exactly what Mathieu just pointed out; who are we 
talking to, which members play central roles, which are the dynamics of 
those groups?
If all the members subscribed to this list where to share a real space 
for 1 hour, of course the results of the discussion will be completely 
different.

(with the authorization of this list manager:)I took the freedom to 
start mapping empyre a couple of days ago.
Here is how this list looks like at this moment:

http://marumushi.com/apps/socialcircles/socialcircles.cfm?list=empyre&m=1&s=0

It is a very crude representation of the list and I believe much more 
can be done to improve this project (having this as a plugin for email 
clients is probably a better idea)

you may learn more about this project here:
http://marumushi.com/apps/socialcircles/

I'm always all open to hear about suggestions on how to make this maps 
represent the lists in a more clear and accurate way, so if you have 
any, let them come:)

best regards,

.marcos






Mathieu O'Neil wrote:

> One way of making lists more democratic might be to increase their 
> transparency. For example, regularly publishing a listing of members 
> would help us to understand who it is we are talking to. Some might want 
> to take this further, by indicating (for example) how many contributions 
> members have made over a given period. Or on what topic. Others might 
> see this as a terrible idea, which would reinforce a feeling of 
> competition and destroy the communal spirit of lists. There are probably 
> other suggestions to be made, but I'll leave it at that for now.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mathieu