[SAC] Mailing List Administration

[Jason Birch]

My preference is to outsource anything that is not trivial and is free
or easy to do elsewhere, whether it's commercial or not (if it counts,
Nabble is an open source shop, offering a commercial service).

We have extremely limited resources, and need to spend them in the way
that is most effective for our business.  Although the knowledge
delivered through our mailing lists is extremely critical, the search
interface to this is not a differentiator.  We can't offer a service
that adds more value than the commercial (free) options so, in my
opinion, we should not be wasting our resources on it.

If it doesn't work out, we still have our local archives and can turn up
a local search engine or point to a different archiving service at a
later date if we need to and have the resources at that time.

I have found Nabble's support to be very responsive and professional so
far.  They don't offer any guarantees.  Anyone with a Nabble account can
edit OSGeo-related categories.

Jason

P.S.  All of this is ignoring that Nabble offers a two-way web-based
interface to the mailing lists, which we definitely don't have the
resources to support.  I personally prefer mailing lists, but you would
be surprised at how many end users would much rather use a forum than
subscribe to a mailing list.  Some extremely active MapGuide users
contribute through Nabble.


-----Original Message-----
From: sac-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:sac-bounces at lists.osgeo.org]
On Behalf Of Tyler Mitchell
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 12:04
To: System Administration Committee Discussion/OSGeo
Subject: Re: [SAC] Mailing List Administration

I'm not familiar with all the problems or headaches with these kinds of
search options, so I can't comment on them technically - but I'll at
least through out a few opinions...

I personally don't like the idea of outsourcing a critical tool to a
closed system or commercial service unless necessary.  Are we really
wanting to use a tool that puts unmanaged advertisements on 'our'  
content?

Do they provide good support and have any sort of guarantees around
availability into the future?  Just curious if we'll get left without
any options and have to build our own eventually anyway.

Wouldn't it also be good to maintain/drive traffic back to our sites so
we can get more of a glimpse of who our users are?

Who can edit OSGeo-related categories on Nabble?

Of course, easy for me to say since I'm not familiar with how hard it is
to maintain a search tool :)

Leaving it to the experts...
Tyler

On 15-Jan-07, at 11:37 AM, Jason Birch wrote:

> Would anyone have an objection to linking to Nabble for list archives,

> searching, etc?
>
> http://www.nabble.com/OSGeo.org-f18127.html
>
> I don't personally use this tool (I keep my own archives) but many 
> others have found it useful, and it means that we don't have to 
> maintain htdig/swish-e/lucene/whatever...
>
> Many of the OSGeo projects already had their posts mirrored there, and

> I just added them to the OSGeo.org node as children (which doesn't 
> affect their other locations).  We could look into adding anything 
> else that is missing.
>
> Jason
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: sac-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:sac-bounces at lists.osgeo.org]
> On Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
> Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 09:33
> To: sac at lists.osgeo.org
> Subject: [SAC] Mailing List Administration
>
> Folks,
>
> I have started a wiki page on Mailing lists off the "SAC" page in the 
> wiki.
>
>    http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/SAC:Mailing_Lists
>
> Please feel free to extend, etc.
>
> Best regards,
> --
> ---------------------------------------
> +--------------------------------
> ---------------------------------------+------
> I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam,
> warmerdam at pobox.com
> light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
> and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo,
> http://osgeo.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sac mailing list
> Sac at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/sac
> _______________________________________________
> Sac mailing list
> Sac at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/sac

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