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

[Corinne Cath]

Hi Nick,

Just a quick question re: your comments on total subscribers. Maybe Niels
also has some ideas about this?

Best,

On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 12:39 AM, Nick Doty <npdoty at ischool.berkeley.edu>
wrote:

> 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.
>

​Who would that be in the case of the IETF?​



> 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
>



-- 
Corinne Cath
Ph.D. Candidate, Oxford Internet Institute & Alan Turing Institute

Web: www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/corinne-cath
Email: ccath at turing.ac.uk & corinnecath at gmail.com
Twitter: @C_Cath
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