An internet mailing list is like a perpetual meeting without an agenda, without any urgency or stakes. It’s impossible to invoke politeness to get people to stop being abusive, and impossible to invoke urgency to get people to decide on some thing or commit to an action.

I find wikitech-l to be the single most productive venue of communication in our development community. IRC follows very closely as well. The pseudo-anonymity of it makes it hard to control abusive behavior, yes; but I don’t find wikitech-l to be abusive (foundation-l is another matter :p).

Meetings don’t always solve the urgency issue either. For a previous employer, I was involved in a series of meetings about revamping one department’s website. It took us a month of weekly meetings before we started to make any progress with requirements; ended up spending two months on requirements.

I agree there’s benefits to both, but I remain firmly convinced that public venues of communication (both sync and async) are the best way to do things.

However, I think we do scrums a bit wrong (in our group) since we sit down in a private room. The best ones are held standing up in a common area so everyone has a sense of urgency.

Also, I’m not sure that there’s a direct mapping between Aryeh’s points and what you’re talking about here. In fact I would argue it goes the other way.

An internet mailing list is like a perpetual meeting without an agenda, without any urgency or stakes. It’s impossible to invoke politeness to get people to stop being abusive, and impossible to invoke urgency to get people to decide on some thing or commit to an action.

IMO being in the same physical space usually helps *solve* the issues you mentioned. For instance, you just proclaimed that you are not going to attend any more useless meetings. That’s great! But that statement also only has force if your absence can be noticed, and that only happens with in-person meetings.