Date:         Tue, 23 Dec 2003 16:17:34 -0500
Reply-To:     Howard Schreier <Howard_Schreier@ITA.DOC.GOV>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Howard Schreier <Howard_Schreier@ITA.DOC.GOV>
Subject:      SAS-L Panel / Coping with the High Volume
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

[This is part of a report on a panel discussion about SAS-L which took
place during the 2003 NESUG conference. Partcipants: Paul Dorfman, Ron
Fehd, Phil Mason, Barbara Okerson, Dianne Louise Rhodes, David Septoff]


On the subject of Coping with the High Volume ...

Paul would like to see more self-moderation to reduce the amount of
chatter.

Dianne said that seeing SAS-L traffic in a client which organizes by
thread makes it easier to comprehend the whole.

Phil advocated usage of the LISTSERV web interface to get an overview
of SAS-L traffic.

David said he reads his e-mail on a Blackberry, and pointed out using a
low-bandwidth client makes one more sensitive to repetition and anything
else which makes SAS-L messages longer and more numerous.

Phil encourages people to utilize features of their mail/news clients
to make the volume more manageable.

Dianne said that she tends to tune out on very long threads. She finds
that too often they are digressions from the original issue or have
turned into "can you top this" contests.

Paul indicated that he finds digressions valuable, because such
discussions can lead to discoveries and lessons which otherwise would
have been missed. He did concede that sometimes the sophisticated code
that results can be overwhelming relative to the simple question which
spawned it.

Phil observed that SAS-L's usual tolerance of newbies would tend to
increase the volume.


[See "SAS-L Panel" on
http://www.listserv.uga.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0312d&L=sas-l for more.
Any misrepresentations in this report are unintentional and are my
responsibility.]

Howard Schreier