[Foss4g2009] Handling mass email in conjunction with Tour Hosts

[Dave Patton]

On 2008/09/10 3:04 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> Dave has raised some valid concerns about my proposals for how Tour 
> Hosts should engage with the Organising Committee over email

> Our challenge is that we want Tour Hosts to dedicate their fixed
> amount of time to the tasks that they do best, conference organising.
> 
> We generate a lot of email, and Tour Hosts are new to working with
> such a lot of traffic (I understand they were reading the same text
> over and over as the thread continued). How do we make sure Tour
> Hosts become efficient at reading emails so they can have time to
> work on the important stuff?

A) Culture
People involved with OSGeo tend to be comfortable
with technology, and, given the diverse geographic
nature of OSGeo and it's projects, people are used
to using various electronic means of communication
to communicate. Much of that communication takes
place via email, most of which is on mailing lists.
Also often used is IRC, RSS feeds, etc. Conference
Calls come into play sometimes, and face to face
meetings can, depending on the people and the
project, be rare. The opportunity to meet face to
face is one of the key benefits that comes out of
the FOSS4G conference.

Based on some comments, and the current situation,
I have the impression that Tour Hosts is used to
a different 'culture', where they do 'their thing'
(taking care of all the "organizing stuff"), and
communicate directly with one or two people from
'the client', who in turn will have discussions
as needed with 'the rest of their colleagues'.

So, in one sense, maybe we have two different ways
of doing things, but we have to find a way that
works for both sides, because we both have the same
goal: a successful FOSS4G 2009 conference.


B) Technology
The "G" in OSGeo doesn't stand for 'Geek', but
many of the people involved in OSGeo would be
considered 'geeky types' ;-) As such, there are
enough people around on this list that can help
with any questions Tour Hosts have about 'how we
do things' or 'how does that work', etc. :-)


C) Mailing Lists
A list is a list is a list. What I'm saying is
that mailing lists have existed for a long time,
and the way they are used is well established,
and we shouldn't be trying to 'reinvent the wheel'
or coming up with elaborate schemes to bend them
to suit what we want to accomplish, when there
are solid alternatives.
And for the record, I wouldn't consider this list
(or the private list) to be "high volume" lists.
Yes, there has been a flurry of emails just recently,
but it was 'all quiet' for a while before that, and
I expect the same pattern will continue. I think
the issue isn't the email volume, but how to deal
with the emails in an effective manner.


D) Mailing List membership
This is a public, unmoderated, mailing list. As such,
anyone can join, and participate as much or as little
as they want. I think that for this list, and the
corresponding 'private list', all FOSS4G 2009 OC
(Organising Committee) members must be subscribed, and
that Tour Hosts(TH) must have at least one person who
is a member of each list. There might be other lists
created for which the same applies, such as an
"announcements" list. There also may be other lists
created which do not require any participation by
the OC or TH. For example, mailing lists used by
a 'Workshop Committee'(WC), where the WC chair
could communicate 'WC stuff' to this list.
For Tour Hosts, who may have only one or two people
on the lists, we could setup list memberships for
others on their staff, but have those memberships
set to receive no email, and not be able to send
emails to the list. That way those memberships
would have access to the list archives, in case
they want to refer to them.


E) Mailing list configuration
Configure our mailing lists with "reply to list".
It's so obvious that this is the correct way to
configure lists that are used for public group
collaboration that I won't say any more about it.
Lets just "get it done".


F) Email protocols
There are lots of different (sometimes strongly held)
opinions about "the best" way to configure mailing
lists and to use email, but here is what I would
suggest we do to make use of our mailing lists the
most efficient.

F-1)
Plain Text only.
The OC and TH people on the lists configure their
email client to send only plain text emails to the
lists. No use of HTML-formatted emails. We can't
enforce that for others on this public list, but
if we all do our part, that will certainly help.
I've already seen a number of cases on our lists
where someone has used HTML, and made reading the
subsequent emails harder than it needs to be.

F-2)
No changing of the email's Subject.
Various email clients, and the mailing list software,
rely on "threading" as a way to make management of
email easier. While that is sometimes done via
'hidden header information', it may also be done via
the content of the email's Subject line. Regardless
of "threading", keeping the Subject unmodified means
that it is easy to sort emails to 'group them together'.
If someone wants to 'branch off' from an existing email
thread's topic, do it by starting a brand new email,
enter the new Subject, and cut&paste content as needed.

F-3)
Trim replies.
Everyone should trim any unneeded material from the
email when they make a reply. In some cases, it may
be appropriate to indicate that this has been done, by
leaving blank lines, adding a line with "[snip]", etc.

F-4)
Do not Top Post.
Either add the text of your reply at the bottom of
the email (i.e. after the (trimmed) quoted text),
or intersperse your reply with the quoted text.
The goal is to create an email that you can read
'from top to bottom', just as you read a book.

F-5)
Use a proper Signature Delimiter.
Configure your email client to start your signature
block with a proper signature delimiter, so that
when people reply to your emails, your signature
block is automatically not included in the reply.
A proper signature delimiter is two dashes followed
by a single space, on a line by itself (see the line
above "Dave Patton" in this email for an example).


G) Software for Tour Hosts
Just a suggestion, but using a 'different setup'
for Tour Hosts staff to participate on our mailing
lists might make (some) things easier:
- get a GMail account, and use that account to
   subscribe to our mailing lists
- install Thunderbird, configured to use POP to
   access the GMail account
- in Thunderbird setup some folders and filters
   to, at a minimum, have one folder for each
   mailing list
Other than occasionally logging in to check
GMail's spam folder for false positives, the
GMail account doesn't need any attention.
Using Thunderbird this way not only separates
the mailing list emails from 'the regular emails
in your current inbox', but it is also easy to
setup to do things like sending plain text emails
with a proper signature delimiter, and it's easy
to use it's filtering and searching features.
It could even be configured so that there is a
single GMail address used by TH, with multiple
TH staff having Thunderbird installed, so that
they all get the emails from the list(s), and
it is easy to see who is sending/replying to
emails, because they would each have their own
signature block.

-- 
Dave Patton
CIS Canadian Information Systems
Victoria, B.C.

Degree Confluence Project:
Canadian Coordinator
Technical Coordinator
http://www.confluence.org/

OSGeo FOSS4G2007 conference:
Workshop Committee Chair
Conference Committee member
http://www.foss4g2007.org/

Personal website:
Maps, GPS, etc.
http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/