[Bigbang-dev] Potential things to ask of big bang

[Nick Doty]

On Jun 28, 2018, at 5:47 PM, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 2. how many people are subscribed to a list in total?
> if I remember correctly, not even in principle
> 
> ​Interesting, why is this the case? ​
> 
> David is quite right on this point.
> 
> The data we currently have available are archived emails sent to the mailing list. Essentially, it is what you would see if you were a subscriber yourself, in your inbox.
> 
> From this we can identify who has *sent* to the mailing list.
> 
> But subscribers who never send a message are not represented in the data.

I've gotten this question before from people reviewing my work on mailing list analysis. It might potentially be very interesting to know who is participating in the sense of just receiving emails by subscribing to the list without sending any messages. But that data is typically not public; probably mostly for spam-protection reasons, but there might also be a privacy interest in subscribing to a mailing list without letting others know that you have.

People who operate mailing lists do have access to that subscriber list, so you could potentially get mailing list owners to share that data for research purposes under some sort of confidentiality agreement and with IRB review. I haven't gotten to that point yet, but it could be useful for comparing those who lurk on governance/decision-making mailing lists to those who send messages.

—npd
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