[members-discuss] Is mailing list become too small for RIPE?

for brevity, I tried to resort this reply.

> On 19.02.2016, at 13:08, Lu Heng <h.lu at anytimechinese.com> wrote:
> 
...
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Matthias Šubik <matthias.subik at ucnd.at> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>> On 19.02.2016, at 12:45, Lu Heng <h.lu at anytimechinese.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> With overwhelming mail traffic for past few days, I just realise one
>>> thing that I'd like to share with fellow colleagues.
>>> 
>>> Now we have 13,000 members, and keep growing at 2000 member a year,
>>> with all those amount of active discussion, maybe maillng is not such
>>> a good idea for such big group, maybe Forum …
>> ...
>>> Let me know what everybody thinks.
>> 
...
>> e-Mail needs discipline, or a client like gmail, that does the clean up for you (minus the privacy).
>> 
>> The problem is not the size, I would guess lists like the LKML have more members. It is the automatic subscription.
>> On the other hand, the members won’t find this list.

> 
> 1. not everyone has gmail client and not everyone want to change their
> mail solution just for the sake of single list.
This is correct, if you auto-subscribe the members main e-Mail to this list, you even mess up the mass e-Mail setup of those who happen to have a dedicated e-Mail solution for ML-discussions.
>> 
>> So maybe each members contact needs to be on here, but needs a good welcome package, including the do’s and don’ts on mailing lists. Seems to be forgotten knowledge these days.
> 
...
> 
> 2. educate everyone behave(and in this case more like educate 13,000
> companies) are near impossible job.

This is a question of moderation, not of the technology.
I guess the original idea was, to have a way to address all members, from RIPE, and from within the community of members. 
> 
> 3. Forums are more passive engagement then mailling list(in mailling
> list you ware almost forced to engage every message there at the time
> it posted unless you do quite a bit trick to your mail solution),
> while in the Fourm you may choice when you want to read it.
Or if you want to read at all.
The Problem with the forum is: I would wonder if more than a few hundred readers would use it.
As you said: “when you want to read it”.
e-Mail is push, and it is therefor the medium of choice for bad news, or information the sender wants to get through, not the receiver wants to have “right now”.

> 
> 4. Ripe now has more member than the other 4 RIR together combined, so
> it make sense to discuss issue in more organized way.

I second that. But it isn’t a technology / medium question. It is a social one.
How do I reach out to 13000 members, with probably more languages combined compared to most other online communities?

This is the real question which needs to be asked here.
I need to ask all members to vote on a topic, for their opinion, etc. You can’t do that in a forum, unless the forum is backed by *hearthedrums* e-Mail notification.

So how to deal with a list of autosubscribed members? moderation-only? I don’t know.
What I do know for certain is, members need to interact with RIPE NCC, with the community, on abuse, IPv6 transition and probably other topics.
As a LIR you can’t unsubscribe from being a member, and pretend change doesn’t happen.

Matthias
ps: I tried to pick up all the different topics covered in this thread. If I missed one, let me know.