Check out http://www.penguinday.org for info about Penguin Day, which is taking place this year a day after the Nonprofit Technology Conference (http://www.nten.org/ntc). I will be at both events and look forward to opportunities to talk to people about Mailman usability and replicating Yahoogroups-like functionality using open source.
Best wishes,
Tobias
-- Tobias Eigen Executive Director
Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa http://www.kabissa.org
* Kabissa's vision is for a socially, economically, politically, and environmentally vibrant Africa, supported by a strong network of effective civil society organizations. *
Begin forwarded message:
From: Tobias Eigen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: February 17, 2005 11:51:45 AM EST To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [NOSI discussion] Same planet, different worlds
On a related note, how many of you will be at NTC next month and the associated Penguin Day Chicago on the following Saturday?
Ah! So that's when it's going to be! I've been waiting for news via penguinday.org... now I can book my flight!
Anyone got something really profound or eye-poppingly cool that you want to demo, discuss, or proclaim at PD?
For Kabissa, I've been tracking and actively participating in lots of discussions about yahoogroups and replicating the best aspects of it using open source. I would be really interested in taking advantage of Penguin Day to raise awareness of the need for this and to generate momentum to raise funds, find partners and recruit developers to work on it.
While alot of great work is being done on open source list managers and on discussion forums/web collaboration tools, there is not much progress being made on bringing the two together in an open source project that can be replicated and made broadly useful by many organizations. It's happening, but piecemeal and in the meantime it's a shame to subject ordinary people to Mailman's web interfaces (try accessing the private archives for the NOSI discussion list and you'll see what I'm talking about) and to not properly take advantage of the dynamic and empowering effect of connecting people through their mailboxes as well as through a beautiful community Web site. For Kabissa it's incredibly important because the people in Africa we serve pay dearly for their Internet connection and we want to empower them to make the most of their limited time oline.
Now there seems to be a particularly grand opportunity because a bunch of things are coming together at the same time:
1) Mambo was awarded a Product Excellence Award at LinuxWorld this week (http://www.mamboserver.com) - one of the things that makes Mambo excellent is that it can be easily extended using optional components, and it's easy to create and share components
2) Opendgroups is being developed to share the functionality of the already successful dgroups.org service using open source (see http://www.opendgroups.net). One of the models being considered is a Mailman/Drupal integration.
3) Mailman developers are recognizing the need for making its web interfaces more usable (see http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ msg08628.html and subsequent onslaught of messages).
4) Mail2forum, a phpbb add-on that provides bidirectional email/list support, is now at v1.0 RC2. (http://www.mail2forum.com) - m2f developers claim it can be easily ported to other forums and welcome a project team to port it to another forum that integrates better with Mambo (see http://www.mail2forum.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=796).
5) Alot of reputable, open source friendly web developers are using Mambo - i.e. Sangonet in South Africa (http://www.sn.apc.org) and Picnet (http://www.picnet.net - also will be at NTC). Picnet is interested in developing a CAN-SPAM act compliant Mambo newsletter component (http://www.picnet.net). This could complement an integrated forum component nicely and share code with it to interact with a list manager like Mailman.
6) Kabissa's interest in all of this is that we want to deepen the impact of our programs by integrating and improving our existing online offerings through the development of a new integrated Web site. We have 850 member organizations throughout Africa that are seeking to make better use of ICT for the benefit of their communities, and many of them are hosting their Web sites and domain names on Kabissa, participating in our Time To Get Online training program, and finding each other online through our member contact directory, bulletin board and mailing lists. Having bidirectional functionality for newsletters and discussion groups integrated into our site will really help us to deliver on our promise to the African civil society sector. This user group also provides a great source of willing volunteers for pilot testing.
7) Kabissa is also involved in developing a community Web site for the Africa Democracy Forum (http://www.africademocracyforum) which currently interacts primarily through a Yahoo Group and face-to-face meetings. We are planning to work with the ADF to move their Yahoo Group to a Mambo-integrated forum, where we can then do alot more to help ADF members to interact online, discuss key topics and share information about opportunities. One of the key requirements for the forum is to have bidirectional email support, in part also to ease the pain of migrating from yahoogroups.
Sorry for the lengthy list - I'm throwing this out there for discussion. I'm sure I and others on this list could come up with even more ideas. :-) If we could bring together a group at Penguin Day to discuss some of these different pieces of the puzzle perhaps we could come up with a collaborative plan for producing a very useful and broadly replicable open source product.
Cheers,
Tobias
_______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org
Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
