Part 2: On moderating lists, Wise Women and future projects

As a List Mom, what challenges do you face in managing a mailing list?
One of the issues I've seen come up on a number of different communities lately is that of how to handle off-topic posts. My experience is that one-third of the people on the list love them. It helps them to associate posts with personalities and turns answering questions on a list into helping out friends. Another third of people on lists hate off-topic posts with a passion. They're trying to get a task done and the chatting going on drives them up the wall.

As a list mom, it's hard to find a happy medium when an equal number of people on a list feel so strongly both for and against an issue.

What advice do you have for current and future mailing list moderators?
My solution to this dilemma for the Wise-Women list was to start an associated WW-Talk list, which is where all off-topic posts from the WW list are supposed to go. The folks who hate the off-topic posts are happy to police the list (polite requests to "please take this to the talk list" are almost always sufficient) and those who love having a place for free-for-all banter appreciate that there's a place for it.

I don't believe that I've seen any other lists or communities take this approach, and it's worked out very well for us. I'm a big fan of win-win solutions.

Tell us about Wise-Women. Why did you choose to get involved with the organization of all the techie orgs out there available to women?
At the time the group started in the late 1990s, there weren't a lot of women's organizations out there. There was one big group, WebGrrls, which was primarily focused on local, geographically based chapters. There were a number of groups online, but the only one I found that was focused on web development back then was Spiderwoman.

That was a wonderful list, but after a couple of years, the list mom got involved in other ventures and didn't have the time for it any more. When things started falling apart I, along with a few other refugees started the Wise-Women list.

To the best of my knowledge, we're the only group around that focuses entirely on Internet-based communication. Every other group I've seen assumes that you live near other group members and that you have the time to get together with them face-to- face. Consequently, WW gets a lot of members who live in the boondocks (like myself), are parents (like myself) and/or have other major time commitments but who want to participate in a community of people with similar interests but can't make it to meetings for whatever reason.

You recently made a big commitment, congratulations on your wedding to co-author, Tom Negrino. What are you future collaboration plans other than marriage?
Thank you very much! Beyond our joint JavaScript book, which we update every 18-24 months, we don't have any other collaboration plans. We've tried to work on other projects together, but after a while, we came to the realization that there are plenty of other possible co-authors, but that people we can live with are few and far between. With our JavaScript book, our roles are separate and very well-defined, so there's not as much room for disagreement.

The latest edition of "JavaScript for the WWW, 4th edition: Visual QuickStart Guide" just shipped in April, so it'll be a while until we need to revise it again. I'm currently working on the 2nd edition of "Java for the WWW: Visual QuickStart Guide," which should be out sometime in the fall.

Which came first? The co-author or the fiancé?
This is starting to sound like Lifestyles of the Weird and Geeky. We met in 1994, when we were both on the Board of Directors of the late, lamented, Los Angeles Macintosh User Group and started dating a few months later.

Over the next couple of years, Tom wrote a few books about the Macintosh, and was looking at moving into more Internet-related topics, when Peachpit approached his agent about him writing a JavaScript book. He knew that he could handle the writing end, but not the coding end. I knew that I could handle the coding end, but not the writing end. We took it on as a joint project, and it's been very successful and opened a number of doors for both of us.

After seven years together, we decided that it was time to (finally!) tie the knot, and we got married on May 6, 2001.

Thanks for the interview and best of luck on future collaborating.