AM> Worse -- we have [email protected] *and* [email protected], and we're
AM> having this discussion ON BOTH LISTS! Why? At a minimum, because no
AM> one knows the difference between the two lists.

Mailman knows!

https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech says

  The [email protected] mailing list is an open forum for the discussion of
  any technical topics of interest to systems administrators. This list is
  technology agnostic, and constructive communications regarding any
  operating system, vendor, or technology are welcome.

and https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss says

  The [email protected] mailing list is an open forum for the discussion
  of topics related to the LOPSA organization and the larger system
  administration community that are not already covered by existing
  lopsa.org mailing lists.

  Topics that would be appropriate for this list include discussion of new
  and existing services of LOPSA, discussion about LOPSA elections, and
  discussions about the operations of the LOPSA organization.

I can vaguely believe that if the split was rigorously enforced, there
might be some people who really didn't care about the meta type stuff that
should in theory be confined to discuss -- like this thread, for example --
and who would thus want to subscribe only to tech and not to discuss.

Also, neither of those really covers things like non-technical sysadmin
issues, like how to hire people, or how to deal with a dysfunctional boss
or dysfunctional teammates, or whatever, but enh. Although huh, there is
also [email protected], which doesn't actually have a long description,
but whose short description is "Professional, Career and Workplace
Issues", so I guess in theory that sort of thing should in theory go there.

I don't personally think it would do much harm to collapse all three of those
down to one list, called something like discuss or general or misc or whatever.

Most of the other lists at https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/
are regional groups or lists for conference organizers, which seem like
reasonable things to have.

There are a couple of other "interest group" type things:

  hpsysadmins     System Administrators of HP Hardware and Firmware
  lopsa-security  [no description available]
  publicpolicy    LOPSA Public Policy Committee
  sajobs          LOPSA Jobs Mailing lIst
  smallsites      Small site sysadmin issues.

And three montoring-related lists:

  lmpt                        LOPSA Mentorship Program Team
  mentor-program              [no description available]
  mentors                     [no description available]

I'm not sure how many of those are active. smallsites hasn't gotten any
messages since May of 2010, hpsysadmins since Dec 2010 (and only one
message ever that wasn't a test message.) sajobs seems like a reasonable
thing to have, as people often like the idea of having a separate space
for job postings. lopsa-security is a recent one, and has gotten a few
posts a month since it was started in April, although none in November.

The archives of the others are members-only.

Anyway, there's some data. I agree that while the split exists, this topic
is appropriate for [email protected], but I figured I'd send this to tech
as well since it answered some questions that were raised there.

                                      -Josh ([email protected])
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