RE: [SAC] Mailing List Administration

Committees SAC mailing list
1

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@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:sac-bounces@lists.osgeo.org]
On Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 09:33
To: sac@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@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@lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/sac

2

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 :slight_smile:

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@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:sac-bounces@lists.osgeo.org]
On Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 09:33
To: sac@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@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@lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/sac
_______________________________________________
Sac mailing list
Sac@lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/sac

3

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,

This sounds good to me. I will look into adding links to the osgeo.org nabble
page in a few appropriate places related to mailing lists (starting with the
SAC mailing list page).

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org

4

Tyler Mitchell wrote:

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?

Tyler,

This is a fair question.

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.

I don't really see this is a big issue. We will continue to maintain
our own archives, and can always build search mechanisms based on them
in the future if we want.

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?

We haven't been doing any serious reviews of our web logs, nor have we
been taking advantage of even a fraction of what we could be doing by
other means (such as user enabled accounts for the drupal site), so I
don't see a big issue here.

Who can edit OSGeo-related categories on Nabble?

Apparently at least Jason! If we adopt Nabble in a serious way then I
think we should try to organize who and how these are updated.

Keep in mind that:
  o Some of the lists are are already going into nabble.
  o Some folks are already searching or even reading them via nabble.

But we would be putting some effort into ensuring that all interesting
lists make it into nabble, and we would be "giving away" some karma by
pointing people to the nabble archives from our official pages.

There are other options, such as Norman pointed out a week or two ago.
I will say that "htdig" style do-it-ourselves searching is somewhat
lame in my experience.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org

5

Remember that simply keeping the mailman archives publicly readable ensures that they are indexed by all the search engines. Anything else like Nabble is primarily providing additional user-friendliness. So I don't see it as critical.

Furthermore, the 2nd most critical function we have is searchability that arises from being available on Google et. al. so by definition, we're outsourcing critical functionality.

The first critical function? Developing useful content to be searched in the first place...

  Allan

On Jan 15, 2007, at 16:24, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

Tyler Mitchell wrote:

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?

Tyler,

This is a fair question.

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.

I don't really see this is a big issue. We will continue to maintain
our own archives, and can always build search mechanisms based on them
in the future if we want.

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?

We haven't been doing any serious reviews of our web logs, nor have we
been taking advantage of even a fraction of what we could be doing by
other means (such as user enabled accounts for the drupal site), so I
don't see a big issue here.

Who can edit OSGeo-related categories on Nabble?

Apparently at least Jason! If we adopt Nabble in a serious way then I
think we should try to organize who and how these are updated.

Keep in mind that:
o Some of the lists are are already going into nabble.
o Some folks are already searching or even reading them via nabble.

But we would be putting some effort into ensuring that all interesting
lists make it into nabble, and we would be "giving away" some karma by
pointing people to the nabble archives from our official pages.

There are other options, such as Norman pointed out a week or two ago.
I will say that "htdig" style do-it-ourselves searching is somewhat
lame in my experience.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@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@lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/sac

--
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
adoyle@eogeo.org