
Email Transparency at Khan Academy - tghw
http://bjk5.com/post/71887196490/email-transparency-at-khan-academy
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chany2
* Not sure if my response was posted on your site. Repeated here:

It seems like what you and your team really need is 'like' a Sharepoint /
Dropbox for Emails where anyone (if permissions are set) can read through
email content and project progression highlighted in email communication.

I recently put together a hack introducing Hashtags for Email. The idea is you
hashtag important emails (in your case, most to all emails). Ex: "This
Tuesday, I giving a #Project_A demo on #storage strategy at #Boxcon." This
creates hashtag threads #Project_A, #storage, and #Boxcon. Non-storage team
members can be invited to the thread read through the email discussion.

This stems from activity done personally, saving important content - Evernote
for Email. In a team environment, email can be distributed - Sharepoint for
Email.

Demo @
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948659)

Granted, there are differences in your team's implementation vs. hashtagging
contents. i.e. email client agnostic

~~~
robbiemitchell
For those who want to go super radically transparent: create one single Group
everyone in the org is a member of. CC it on every non-private email.

Org members create a filter that puts the email away if they are not a direct
recipient.

To follow along, search by hashtag (or anything else).

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yapcguy
It's transparent alright... they use Gmail!

Ok, joking aside, the article is about how they use email filters in Google
Apps instead of mailing lists.

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abalone
Short version: they have an extra "blackhole"/archive list for every team that
every email is cc'd to. Also anyone can subscribe to anything.

The problem with this is, opacity is not the biggest problem with email. It's
inbox noise. Reading through tons of emails that should have a more limited
audience or have already lost their relevance.

I don't see how this approach reduces noise. If nobody is really expected to
read the archive list, why bother sending something to it? If anything,
transparency might actually make things _worse_ , because they way you get it
is by spending _even more_ time digging through email archives.

To solve the Email Problem I would look to "newsfeed" style systems like
Yammer or completely different models like chatrooms. Those can do a lot more
to prioritize attention.

~~~
kamens
The entire thing is opt-in. Nobody is subscribed to anything by default — if
you want to listen in on the mobile team's archive, you can. But you don't
have to.

This reduces inbox noise because it increases the percentage of emails in my
inbox that people expect me to read completely and/or do something about. No
more "might as well just CC Ben for the heck of it." Those goes elsewhere, for
me to quickly browse the subject line if and when I choose.

~~~
abalone
Not buying it.

A "blackhole" full of random emails to and from miscellaneous team members is
not a great place to send an email that you think Ben might want to scan.

Realistically, for Ben to even see the email, he'd had to dig through tons of
random crap in the hopes that there might be a subject line that catches his
eye. There wouldn't even be an indication that someone thought that particular
one might be up his alley (CC: Ben).. it's just a giant pool of random
subjects to wade through. So that's even _more_ noise for him to wade through.

Realistically, Ben isn't even going to do that. And the sender is going to
realize that too and still CC Ben, so that he gets a chance to scan it.

~~~
kamens
I respect your skepticism, but that's not what happens in practice on our 25+
person team.

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Terretta
Transparency rocks, but this feels really ad hoc.

I mentioned on the Stripe thread: if you get tired of the corner cases and
human nature not handled by their or this hackery, have a look at combining
email aliases or filters on the front end with Best Practical's "Request
Tracker" on the back end.

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arthurjj
This feels like a hack or Domain Specific Language on top of email. It's
interesting to think what the RFC for email would have been if how Enterprise
uses actually uses it was baked in from the start

