Phil Gyford

I remember being severely chastised at Freeserve when I first joined for sending an 'all@' email - and it wasn't even fun, it was a work-related URL and a comment.

I find the flurries of responses to all@ emails that occasionally surface really interesting. When they changed the parking policy where I now work, a whole discussion surfaced when someone responded to the original 'all@' from the facilities team.

An impromptu debate about the validity of the new parking policy emerged, which soon descended into farce and jokes, as threads on any discussion list inevitably does. Eventually it was curtailed by a message from the MD that didn't chastise people for posting, but hid behind the "you're annoying people who don't want these emails" excuse.

This was the excuse at Freeserve - I was chastised for sending an all@ because I was 'spamming' my fellow workers. I thought this was nonsense, but since then I've found the vast majority of people who do feel that these company-wide discussions are annoying.

Basically, like all online communities, they are subject to power laws and don't scale. I'm used to participating in high-volume discussion lists, and was shocked that people's tolerances were so low. But the majority of other people I've worked with much prefer the traditional water-cooler chat and the occasional email send to a list of friends than the massive company-wide discussion.

At UMS, you had a bulk of people who were used to high-volume lists, as you did at Wired. Outside of the new-media business, this kind of experience is still relatively rare, and people just don't like the level and volume of an email conversation when it's mapped across a large number of people.

Chris.

[Note: I just changed the "everyone@" in the title to "all@". I'm guessing all@ is more common and it's slightly catchier. But it's still an ugly title.]

At Delphi back in '96 we had a main office list and an irreverent (in the purest sense of the word) side list that was just employees, no management - it was set up by the sysadmin (Stuart Tily) and management (who were all News International people) didn't know about it. So it was great for making snide/silly comments.

At least, it was until management found out that there was an employee chat list. They didn't try and shut it down, but they did ask to be subscribed, at which point the list fell completely silent and the employees moved to a more-secret list.

(My memory of this is very hazy. Matt or Stuart or other ex-Delphites will probably remember more, including the name of the list in question)

Excellent stuff. The issue of whether management should be on the "anything goes" list is tricky. They'd want to monitor the list if it was officially hosted, but that would probably only spawn a more underground alternative (as you say). UpMyStreet's management-free Yahoo! Group was a great outlet during the painful administration process.

Maybe it's just employees' duty to start an externally-hosted, management-free chat list whenever a new dotcom starts :)

Standard management paradox. The free-for-all@ list serves an essential tension-release function for the organization, but management have to be officially disapproving for the thing to function.

Surely the establishment of both formal and informal at the beginning with clearly defined usage parameters for each. No other way surely.

In this manner, employees (management included) choose whether or not to take any notice of the more casual backchat, with the knowledge that they will receive the 'required' information that has to flow through the company (without having to wade through acres of dribble and hungover rubbish).

I'd avoid any pre-disposition that the informal list would be 'good' or 'fun' or 'better', however. The fact that some of us enjoy extraneous information does not mean everyone does. If someone does not wish to join in, it does not make them any less 'fun'. Some lists can reek of superiority to people simply trying to get their job done.

I would also caution against an expectation that it is the 'management' who are neccesarily uninterested in a more casual list; these lists can be intimidating, or just plain boring to people...

And - why does a casual list *have* to be irreverent/rude to the point where any management interest will shut it down? Is it in the definition of 'company'?: "... to have a raft of dissatisfied employees who have to bitch about the management elsewhere in cyberspace..."?

Was it the volume of dribble rushing through the first UMS list that shut it down, or was it the creeping use of swearwords? Or was it a symptomatic development of adolescence, as you say?

Sure, some people other than management wouldn't like a "chatty" list. But management often don't like it *and* are in a position to do something about it.

And you're right about an "anything goes" list not necessarily being "good" - I unsubbed from Syzygy's as I found it dull at the time.

I'm not sure exactly why UpMyStreet's list was shut down... it was discussed in management meetings and news failed to reach any non-management people I spoke to.

In my experience after the first year this stuff didn't actually happen on mail lists in the company directory: it either started on lists or groups outside, or everyone had their own personal "list". Perhaps this is because after about T+1.5 my employer was an accretion of so many different companies that it no longer had an identity as a company that had gone from startup to grownup - its lifecycle by then was from one reorg to another. When you're not sure who everyone@ actually includes, you're less likely to use it. I suspect we had many overlapping, informal lists.

For me, more exemplary of that moment betw startup and grownup is when you realise that not only are you spending more time in meetings about the work that you do than you spend doing the work, but those meetings have permanently drained away your energy for and interest in the work, without you even noticing.

Jamie Zawinksi talks -- http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html -- about how in its early days, Netscape had a 'bad-attitude' newsgroup, ostensibly to allow the employees to let off steam.

Except that later employees got offended, and so he started the 'really-bad-attitude' mailing list. Which was fine, until it got subpoena'd by Microsoft.

How about avoiding this de facto model of managers as 'bound to dislike any informal list'?

An informal list can be an inclusive group oriented space of its own, which should harmonise a company. For example, such a list could avoid chinese whisper style pub invites, and democratise the whole going to the pub thing... So the 'management' could well approve of it thorougly - you would just have to set up clearly defined parameters.

In light of this thought - perhaps this is a post about the nature of management and how the traditionally more serious players in a company have to come to terms with the current fad for 'flatter' 'team-based' styles of working.... Perhaps informal mail lists are simply a tool within this paradigm...

Yes I agree about the benefits of informal lists. But I can only go by my personal experience (in companies that were quite "enlightened" on the scale of things). In those cases management didn't want mailing lists that discussed non-work stuff.

Two different companies I've been involved with have taken the "best tactic" described above. One never got large enough to really test the theory; in the second one, having a siphon worked quite well. The us vs. them thing is inevitable, but this was not one of the hallmarks of it here.

I would also like to let everyone know that I am also aware that this email message is a HOAX!!! CC: All

A similar thing happened as our company grew in size overnight during the dot com boom. . . all of a sudden people were outraged to be getting company wide emails from other coworkers.. unless it was a message letting them know that there were leftover catered sandwiches in the cafe... :)

Not precisely related, but something like the other end of the telescope: I worked at a Major Global Financial Services Company, which was going through a rough patch, ditching its outsourced IT division and bringing a small fraction back in-house, and selling off one of its bread-and-butter brands. People were nervous about Big Announcements. An Everyone e-mail went out straight from HR -- it may have been about a videoconference being scheduled. For some reason some person responded to this mail, /and the server permitted them to/, thus sending their reply to everyone at this Major Global Company. (We've all seen this happen: someone in the Denver office puts out a "Adopt a Puppy, See Jill in Parking Lot" that goes to London, Portland, and Seoul. But wait.) It wasn't a particularly polite reply, and may have been a sarcastic comment about the supposed contents of the videoconference or the manner of delivery of the presumed message. Well, after that message, someone else replied that you shouldn't reply to an Everyone mail. And someone else. And someone else. Pretty soon everybody's computer was going "bong!" every few minutes as the original message reached remote Exchange sites and people replied thinking they were the first.

This cascade was the subject of some snickering among us savvy IT folk. But it just didn't stop. Then people started replying to the snark with their own snark. You were getting "People are so stupid to send these messages all around the world" being sent all around the world, in addition to obvious stress-reduction in commentary on the company's status. Computers kept going bong-bong-bong. By the end of the first day there had been a couple hundred messages, which of course were in *everyone's* Inbox, and the Exchange farm began to slow to a crawl.

Overnight some of the mail team began attacking the problem. A lot of the messages were gone when we came in. But new ones kept coming in! Remember, there were a lot of remote sites, probably upwards of 200, and cleaning them all required running scripts remotely on each. The mail cascade continued, the nasty comments about the cascade continued, the snark about the company became positively giddy as it continued without apparent reaction.

About 2pm the 2nd day, an announcement went out that parts of the mail farm were being taken offline, period. That was the turning point. For another day or three, messages continued to bounce in (many of them still reacting to the very earliest parts of the cascade), but it was mainly under control.

Eventually an official announcement from someone at a senior VP level went out that more or less chastised everyone for unprofessional behavior but wrote it off and said it would be technically blocked from then on. (They had finally determined how to set the Everyone address to be accessible only to certain names.)

The social aspects of this taboo-breaking, stress-busting cascade were quite interesting, particularly in a really buttoned-down company that just didn't DO this.

And then the videoconference came and went, and whatever it was (I forget), it was underwhelming. Some minor cutbacks in discretionary spending, hiring freeze, whatever. The hair-pulling had been for naught. But we couldn't forget that for a couple of days all the rules of corporate e-mail had been chucked out the window.