Re: [Gretl-users] New mailing list?
Although I have brought up the issue in the first place, I must
emphasize that I don't have a strong opinion on this issue. Various
people have expressed their opinions on the subject and we see there a
pros and cons. I think the pros may outweigh the cons, is slightly.
Then again, I don't have much experience in running such lists.
For the sake of completeness of the discussion, I would like to
mention that such a list, if moderated, could be very useful for
improving gretl's documentation. There are experienced econometricians
in the list and their answers for my initial coint2 related question
provide a very thorough view on the subject, missing in the
documentation. (By the way, I am grateful for all those responses.)
An often cited problem regarding open source software is insufficient
documentation. For example, gretl's user manual is dwarfed by Stata's
3 volume Base Reference Manual.
So I think it may be worth considering to set up a list for which
subscription is limited to a balanced mix of experienced
econometricians and maybe less experienced econometricians who know
gretl well and actively involve in its development (such as yours
truly). It is expected that this mailing list would have a very low
message frequency and the posts will be edited and used for improving
a topic or a discussion in gretl's documentation. Of course, the
participants to the list would also be acknowledged in the user's
manual. This would provide additional incentive to participate in
addition to knowing one is doing something helpful for the developers,
mainly Allin and Jack.
If successfull, this could even be a case study in open source
development process.
Best regards,
Talha
On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 3:34 AM, MICHAEL BOLDIN <mboldin(a)temple.edu> wrote:
I was part of asking about making new mailing list but after reading
the replies and recalling my experiences running such a list at one
time, it is probably not worthwhile. If it becomes popular because
experienced GRETL users do respond we will surely encourage a lot of:
'do my econometrics homework for me' (as someone else points out) or
worse: 'how do I apply a technique for which I have no idea about how
it works but want to use it for my dissertation'. Many of the
remainder are likely to be naive and show the person asking the
questions did not bother to first look in their econometrics textbook
Most important: Anyone motivated to make it work (inside or outside
of the GRETL community) could easily start such a list independently
of GRETL. A Google
group is easy to set up. And if Allin, Sven, Jack and others involved
in development and enhancements to GRETL were to encourage something
linked to GRETL, the value added is unlikely to exceed the
distraction.
So I change my vote to letting things stand as they are-- everyone
seeing a few econometrics questions related to GREL every once in a
while.
However, I think an item in the GRETL Help menu for 'Check and use
the GRETL developers listserve' would be a worthwhile addition.
Instead of making it a direct 'Send question to listserve' I suggest
encouraging new users to search the listserve first by simply pointing
to http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-devel and adding the
ground rules to this page.
--my 2 cents
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