[buug] Reviving CalLUG

[Paul Ivanov]

Some quick points - 

Mark Lu, on 2011-04-20 17:24,  wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> In short, it's just balancing something very risky with something more risky.
> The bigger question is where to draw the line. One of the reasons why I
> considered Google Groups is because the data on the mailing lists is
> public anyways, and we have no monetary interest.

We do not - but Google does - and to me this is one good reason
to use CalMail.

Another is that its an interface familiar to Berkeley affiliated
persons, and requires no additional steps on the side of the
user. (as far as I understand, there is no way to subscribe to a
google news group without a google account - this is not true of
a calmail mailing list - which anyone with an email address can
subscribe to).

> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> > Then, I'm a bit confused, now.  Isn't the _simplest_ way to do nothing
> > and leave everyting on CalMail?  Why would a migration to Google Groups
> > (what you were just discussing) be simpler than doing nothing?

this is the plan. see the note about W6BB below.

Back to Mark, who wrote:
> As was mentioned earlier, the lack of public archiving in
> CalMail means that it isn't fulfilling the requirements. Hence,
> it's thrown out of the equation when comparing simplest
> solutions that do fulfill the requirements.

Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water - all we need is
to subscribe an additional address to the CalMail lists and have
the mail that account receives archived in a publicly accessible
place.

I think the biggest thing we gain from staying with calmail is
guaranteed continuity regardless of who's around as interest in
the group waxes and wanes over time.

Here's a concrete example: I'm part of W6BB - the Amateur Radio
club on campus, which is not currently a student organization,
but like CalLUG, has seen its ups and downs in terms of interest
and continuity over the years. 

In its most recent incarnation - it has been run using a non-UCB
server mailman installation for club communications - but
yesterday I discovered there WAS mailing list for the club which
is still operating thanks to UCB IST folks - it just looks like
the information for it has not been updated in 13 years! So I
subscribed to it, and sent an email out to both lists - and we've
already heard back from folks on that *ancient* list that didn't
know the latest incarnation of the club had moved on to a
different list - see "[W6BB] old club list
(circa 1998)" thread on [1].

Also, should we move over to the callug_discuss list, I worry we
might be dropping one of the vowels in this list's acronym, as
far as other folks are concerned ;)

1. http://w6bb.org/pipermail/w6bb_w6bb.org/2011-April/thread.html

-- 
Paul Ivanov
http://pirsquared.org | GPG/PGP key id: 0x0F3E28F7
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