I was reminded of the book The Mythical Man Month, which I consider to be one of the classics on software engineering, when reading Jon Udell on What's Wrong with e-mail for group discussions, in the context of using Radio Userland Outlining, which I found thanks to a link from Scott Johnson's Radio FAQ on News Aggregation (web site change notification).
If I correctly understand Radio Outlining, which I have not yet tried out, this may be the Silver Bullet that Fred Brooks of the Mythical Man Month has been seeking. Thanks to Jon Udell for reminding me what the problem is that is in search of this solution. The classic problem, that I have seen most of my career, is that the complexity of a project is related to the permutations of different people who need to cross-communicate on different sub-threads that can go on for a while, and this leads to management problems and productivity losses.
Learning Radio, and what all can be done with it, is an iterative process, with a lot to absorb.
- I read documentation from Userland, Russ Lipton, Skip Dodson, and others.
- Many of these have links to other sources of Radio documentation.
- Lots of threads to pursue.
- I try stuff out
- Some works, some not.
- Either my PC settings are broke, I doing something wrong, I got misconceptions, or probably combination of all of these, and something else.
- I find stuff that I had not read the documentation on.
- I have no idea what the correct terminology is for what I have found.
- I, and others, dither verbally, on the discussion groups, seeking clarification.
- I read documentation some more, and sometimes get new insight because of what I had tried out and been exposed to, that was clear as mud the first time around, and I suspect my brain's understanding is still very foggy.
- There is some frustration navigating the documentation.
- We need a search engine connection that looks at all the sites where all these people have done any kind of documentation, so I can look up what they have to say on topic X, at one time, and see all there is on topic X.
- It also needs a system of recognizing aliases - the wrong terminology that beginners often use to describe what we find.
2:33:23 PM 
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