Summarised lists
The advantage of dividing the network into themed groups is that you can subscribe to discussions that you are interested in, without becoming flooded with emails every day. The disadvantage is that you don't have a global view of what is going on in the group. To solve this issue, one of the network members encouraged the creation of
discussion summaries: the person asking a question had to write a summary with all the answers received.
Three levels of summaries were defined based on the level of information feedback.
- Level 1 - gathering messages. Returning all exchanges on a topic (the only process involved is to compile all the messaged in an order and clean-up the form).
- Level 2 - gathering messages and shaping them. Intermediate summarising giving messages a certain shape.
- Level 3 - summary. Enriched summary (adding elements and controlling references).
All this under a Creative Commons licence, of course!