"A friendly face on a mail archive would be a great project management tool."<p>This is an excellent observation -- perhaps a bit weak as "project management" is commonly understood nowadays, but archiving and shared access to discussions like this is one of the purest _empowerment_ tools going.[1]<p>At the risk of sounding existential, it's worth reflecting on how the conceptually-simplest things are used in the most effective ways, in this case both for reaching a wide audience, and maintaining a snapshot of a conversation. [2]<p>[1] of course, nowadays we have WhatsApp,Telegram,Signal and others for that sort of thing :-)<p>[2] the conception of Google Wave (latterly Apache Wave) was a real glimpse of a possible new direction for this kind of communication.