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For all their faults1, I still love mailing lists, which can make me an unlikely community-builder. Back at Bucknell, this was in the form of a recreational soccer club that I organized (apparently, recreational sports is a novel idea in the USA).
Today, I moderate
Two years ago, I proposed we start mailing lists. But someone in charge objected that he already received too much email, despite the fact that (1) you can (and should) filter your email: it's no worse than reading it on the web (2) Yahoo Groups gives you several notification options. But it was decided that we couldn't use Yahoo Groups because they wanted the list to have some sort of official recognition. We settled on PHPBB web boards, which has the big disadvantage that new users don't receive notifications by default. Our webmaster ended up creating 4 such boards and advertising them to the students that started in 2004. The boards died very soon, just as I had predicted: people stopped reading because the volume was low, and then people stopped posting because no one read. My mistake back then was to ask permission from the people in charge, instead of just starting a list and inviting people.
This year, 2005, there was still no mailing list for the institute. So I decided to start one, grassroots. We now have 33 members. My mistake this time was calling it "
Now I'm torn between keeping the list united under a bad name ("
1 Disadvantages of mailing lists:
2 By the way, does anyone know how to make nice footnotes on LiveJournal posts?
Today, I moderate
illc-sparetime, a list for social stuff for people in my institute, and amsterdam_bluegrass (woohoo! I'm feeling lucky!), for Amsterdammers interested in bluegrass-related events (mostly my fellow in-a-while-ly pickers).Two years ago, I proposed we start mailing lists. But someone in charge objected that he already received too much email, despite the fact that (1) you can (and should) filter your email: it's no worse than reading it on the web (2) Yahoo Groups gives you several notification options. But it was decided that we couldn't use Yahoo Groups because they wanted the list to have some sort of official recognition. We settled on PHPBB web boards, which has the big disadvantage that new users don't receive notifications by default. Our webmaster ended up creating 4 such boards and advertising them to the students that started in 2004. The boards died very soon, just as I had predicted: people stopped reading because the volume was low, and then people stopped posting because no one read. My mistake back then was to ask permission from the people in charge, instead of just starting a list and inviting people.
This year, 2005, there was still no mailing list for the institute. So I decided to start one, grassroots. We now have 33 members. My mistake this time was calling it "
illc-sparetime", instead of starting with a illc-generic list from which to spin off other mailing lists if the volume got big enough (now I'm inclined to start illc-generic and illc-chat). Now a fellow student just asked our permission to post off-topic, and we said "ok". He's proposing to organize an introductory course on Category Theory, and it's probably going to work. My list is being used for important stuff. :-) I find it hard to believe that it took this long for someone to start an ILLC-wide mailing list. I keep finding, again and again, that very few people are willing to lead the way.Now I'm torn between keeping the list united under a bad name ("
illc-sparetime") in order to keep the high volume, and creating new lists and inviting people all over again facing the risk that they won't generate enough volume. But maybe volume is irrelevant in mailing lists. What do you think?1 Disadvantages of mailing lists:
* when the volume gets too high, I sometimes wish I could subscribe to individual threads, and although GMail makes this ok by grouping threads together as conversations, PHPBB implements a notification system where you can subscribe to individual threads and supports an option where you only get bothered by the first message in each thread (i.e. the thread starter). LiveJournal could learn a lot from them too.
* The default "Reply-To" in a mailing list is replying to the whole list... This is confusing because "Reply" is next to "Reply To All". I think I'll change this default though. 2
2 By the way, does anyone know how to make nice footnotes on LiveJournal posts?
