Personal Email Salons

Personal Email Salons

an alternative institution<br>by Robin Hanson

Most email lists are organized around topics. But I have a friend who has<br>a private email list, and most of us who are on it know it is mainly a<br>place to find out about what that person is thinking about. Which is fine<br>with us.

This got me thinking. If we all did this, it would be sorta like a huge<br>online set of party conversations.

Imagine we each had a personal "party talk" email list. To my personal<br>list I post all my "party" comments, and also appearing there are the<br>contributions of others to the conversations these comments are part of.<br>The readers of the list are as if they were standing next to me at a party,<br>listening to what I say and hear. The comments of a group of us having a<br>conversation would appear on all the personal lists of the people in the<br>conversation. As with a party, you'd like some limited ability to move to<br>a corner to avoid people you don't want around listening or butting in.

To implement this, one possibility is to let each person control who can<br>read or post to their personal list. Then to listen to a conversation,<br>you'd need the permission of at least one participant. And to fully join a<br>conversation, you'd need permission to post to all the lists of the people<br>presently in the conversation.

If a bunch of people all want to discuss a particular topic, they're<br>probably better off creating a particular list for that conversation. But<br>this approach might allow some interesting freer form discussion.

I suspect that managing email lists hasn't been made easy enough yet for most<br>email readers to manage their own list. Especially with the rate of<br>permission giving and revoking I suspect would be ideal for such a system.<br>But we aren't very far away from where this is feasible.

Robin Hanson<br>October 10, 1997