emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Gitlab Migration


From: Tim Cross
Subject: Re: Gitlab Migration
Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2021 13:21:22 +1000
User-agent: mu4e 1.6.5; emacs 27.2.50

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Daniel Fleischer <danflscr@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Tim Cross [2021-08-27 Fri 11:01]  *wrote*:
>>>
>>>> I'm not sure this is true. I think virtually all developers are forced
>>>> to suffer email, but a gorwing number don't use it. Often, all the
>>>> discussions, notifications, comments etc are actually consumed via a
>>>> mobile 'app'. For these users, logging into their inbox is frustrating
>>>> and inconvenient because their inbox is full of pointless and old
>>>> messages/notifications/alerts they have already seen/received via other
>>>> channels. For these users, the primary reason they have an email address
>>>> is to have something to put into the 'login' box for web services they
>>>> use. Telling these users to use email to submit a patch is very similar
>>>> to me being told when I started using email that I had to send in a hard
>>>> copy via snail mail.
>>>
>>> It's a very intersting point about what email represent to different
>>> people that arising from this discussion. I'm half your age and use
>>> email for 2 reasons:
>>>
>>> 1. It's an identify for today's web. As such, it's becoming the main
>>>    tool for tracking (especially as cookies phase out), so I use
>>>    multiple boxes and regard them is disposable and spam-infected.
>>>
>>> 2. Receiving official documents from institutions.
>>>
>>> I don't talk to family, friends or coworkers via mail. Personally, I
>>> think it's old, not secure or private by default, very inconsistent
>>> (HTML rendering is arbitrary vs. text, multiple MUA) and just can't
>>> imagine using it as a software engineering tool.
>>>
>>
>> Yep, that mirrors what I'm seeing as well. Many younger users really use
>> it primarily to provide a unique identifier (login) and for when they
>> have to deal with institutions that don't provide other alternatives.
>>
>> The other interesting trend I'm seeing is with many companies now
>> working to minimise email as part of their internal/external workflows.
>> Many companies are finding it a huge resource sink, cause of unnecessary
>> stress/pressure on staff, source of significant security concerns and a
>> real problem for records management.
>>
>> From the Emacs project perspective, providing alternative web based
>> workflows similar to what github/gitlab/sourceHut provide would be
>> beneficial. The challenge seems to be in finding software which meets
>> FSF requirements. In particular, a solution which is mature enough and
>> is not based on non-free Javascript libraries. 
>
> I wouldn't agree with you that young people don't know how to use email. That 
> is
> something you are deriving yourself. Sure Instagram, Facebook, Dicord, 
> Twitter,
> Slack etc might be very popular as a mean of communication, but saying that
> young people don't know how to use email is stretching it too far.

I never said they don't know how to use email - I said they were not
interested in using email. They use it when they are forced to, but it
is not their preferred choice. We even asked students what they wanted
and when you broke that information down by age, nearly 80% of under 25s
indicated they would prefer non-email based communications. This is only
one data point from one institution and only for one year, so there
could be sampling error, cultural variation and possibly question bias
based on wording etc. However, the results were in line with other
feedback and comments. The preference for email also increased with age
- older students showed a higher preference for email, which means the
results could be related to experience and user maturity - we won't know
until more time has passed.

I cannot provide specific details because the information is classified
as sensitive and internal only. It was part of analysis done at a
smaller University (approx 25k students) where the main objective was to
determine if providing students with an email account (actually o365
account), was beneficial or not. The result was that the majority of
students were not interested in the email account (either because they
already had one or because email was not a comms channel they cared
about), but they did want the o365 account because of the access it gave
them to other things, most notably Office suite. 



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]