People who read my blog regularly know I’ve been researching what happens on mailing lists and in other forms of free online documentation. I now have a sort of portal or home page for the resulting articles. I’ve just published the most recent one, How to Help Mailing Lists Help Readers (Results of Recent Data Analysis). I hope to put up some other interesting experiments besides articles in the next stage of my work. I’ll be speaking about this research at O’Reilly’s Open Source convention on Wednesday, July 24.
Great article and very timely. The Haskell-Cafe mailing list just had a long discussion about maintaining their community, and your results seem very relevant. I'll be sure to send a pointer.
I look forward to seeing your talk at OSCON next week. I also just picked up "Beautiful Code" and so far it's excellent!