At the Qt Contributors’ Summit I did a Social Skills for Geeks session together with Hanne and Alexandra. I’ll try to post a summary of the session as soon as I have the video.
One of the things that we talked about is managing and wasting time. Together with the attendees we came to how much time is wasted by sending useless emails to mailing lists. One of the reasons for that is that people are not aware how many people will get their email and spend at least a few seconds of their day on it. To improve that situation I asked KDE’s sysadmin team to give me the subscriber numbers for our public mailing lists. Here are the numbers for a few of them:
| list | subscribers |
| amarok | 620 |
| bugsquad | 127 |
| digikam-devel | 137 |
| digikam-users | 613 |
| kde | 994 |
| kde-accessibility | 183 |
| kde-announce | 5714 |
| kde-artists | 237 |
| kde-bindings | 174 |
| kde-buildsystem | 201 |
| kde-commits | 153 |
| kde-core-devel | 1124 |
| kde-devel | 1797 |
| kde-edu | 405 |
| kde-extra-gear | 186 |
| kde-freebsd | 491 |
| kde-games-devel | 293 |
| kde-i18n-doc | 537 |
| kde-india | 306 |
| kde-licensing | 99 |
| kde-linux | 888 |
| kde-look | 312 |
| kde-mac | 112 |
| kde-multimedia | 351 |
| kde-nonlinux | 181 |
| kde-pim | 606 |
| kde-promo | 348 |
| kde-quality | 641 |
| kde-science | 98 |
| kde-scm-interest | 183 |
| kde-soc | 351 |
| kde-solaris | 314 |
| kde-usability | 322 |
| kde-windows | 553 |
| kde-women | 201 |
| kde-www | 132 |
| kwin | 172 |
| nepomuk | 141 |
| okular-devel | 88 |
| owncloud | 217 |
| plasma-devel | 585 |
| rekonq | 72 |
| release-team | 193 |
Keep in mind that these numbers are the lower boundary. There are quite a few people on top of that reading mailing lists through GMane and archiving services who do not show up in these numbers.
Have these numbers in mind when sending a useless email to a mailing list. But also have in mind how many people you can potentially reach with important messages.
Wow, a lot of people on kde-announce. Too bad I don’t see many developers of KDE apps announcing their releases there. And while we are at it they also don’t do much promotion on software sites like Freshmeat and social news sites (Reddit, Hacker News, even Digg). I think a lot of improvement could be done here to promote KDE software.
It would be great if you could help with posts on reddit, hackernews and digg. Email me for details if you are interested.
Well, in your lower bound claim you are making an assumption – that – all those who subscribe read / follow the list regularly… which I am sure you would know, can not be the case with opensource projects!
It’s the lower boundary of people who receive the email, yes. If they actually read it in the end is of course another thing. But a very significant part of them will at least read the subject of the email to judge if they should read the whole mail or delete it right away. It just takes a few seconds but it really adds up if you get a lot of emails.