There has been some off-list discussion among some of the OOoAuthors
members about moving this email list to the oooauthors.org server. We
thought we'd bring this up to the list so you can decide (by the way,
"we" includes Agnes, Daniel, Jean, Sigrid, and Janet).
TECHNICAL ISSUES
This mailing list is currently hosted by the user-faq project at
openoffice.org. The server that handles this list has been having
increasing downtime and slowdowns, both in sending out messages and in
updating the archives. Our website, www.oooauthors.org, is hosted on a
completely different server (run by Enthought, Inc., Janet's employer).
We have the capability of running mailing lists on it, which we have not
used up to now. The server hosts two other mailing lists of comparable
size for open source projects, with good performance and plenty of
available bandwidth headroom. We could also have multiple mailing lists,
such as language-specific ones in addition to the current general one.
OTHER ISSUES
The OOo Community Council has raised objections to the books developed
at OOoAuthors being sold, while OOoAuthors uses OOo resources (the
mailing list). (The books are being sold by a separate organization,
Friends of OpenDocument, which has committed to using the proceeds as
decided by the authors of the books.) One outcome of the council
discussion was the possibility that we could no longer host the mailing
list at OOo.
PROS
+ Better list server performance; prompt communication is crucial for a
project such as this, whose membership literally spans the globe.
+ Consistency between our mailing list address(es) and our website address.
+ Less dependence on OpenOffice.org resources means greater freedom for
this project to do as this community decides.
CONS
- There is hassle involved in migrating the list, especially as it may
not be possible to do automatically. People may have to explicitly
subscribe to the new list. As a result, we may lose some list members,
especially less active ones.
- We may lose some "cachet" by being less closely associated with the
OOo site.
- This change makes the project more dependent on Enthought. They might
someday decide to stop hosting OOoAuthors.org, for whatever reason. (We
don't think this is likely, but it is possible.) If that happened, then
we'd have to move both the website and the mailing list to a new server,
though not a new domain. If we don't move the list, then if Enthought
kicks OOoAuthors out, "only" the website would have to move to another
server.
PROCESS
We will create a Plone poll on www.oooauthors.org, for a vote of "yes"
or "no" on moving the mailing list. It will be accessible only to people
who currently have author access to the website. The poll will be open
for one week from the day it is announced. If the outcome is in favor,
the move to the new list will happen as soon as is feasible.
Announcements about the poll and anything else relevent will be made to
this list.
Please discuss this proposal on the list. However, the poll will be the
decision mechanism.
Thank you for your input.
--
Janet Swisher --- Senior Technical Writer
Enthought, Inc. http://www.enthought.com
