Publish or perish

If you have ideas to share with others, publish them immediately in a public forum, or they may perish from this earth. This applies to philosophical ideas, criticisms or assessments, practical feedback on a specific project, and seeds for collaborative works over time.

Sometimes people have ideas that they write down privately, hoping to eventually publish them once they are finished -- but we have dozens of readers and thinkers for every writer, and many of them have comments to contribute to these half-finished ideas.

Many other good discussions which are about public initiatives are also being carried out in private Cc: lists rather than on mailing lists, which keeps them from being archived or linked to later on, and unintentionally limits future contributors to whomever was lucky enough to be in copy in initially.

In an effort to counteract this, I am making a pledge to publish almost all of my writing to public wikis or mailing lists, and to limit private or small-group emails to three lines (and a wiki link) apiece, for the next week; at which point I'll revise here.

--Sj talk 11:14, 7 June 2008 (EDT)