Mailing lists
From Schoolforge-UK
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Using a mailing list
Mailing lists are the lifeblood of online communities. In contrast to wiki pages, which aim to develop a single condensed view of a topic that is available for you to read when you need it, a mailing list provides a sequential discussion in which each person's contribution is sent to all the members of the list. A mailing list therefore presents many different views as the topic evolves over time. Mailing lists are also useful for notifying list members of important or useful information as it arises.
When posting to a mailing list, please bear in mind these guidelines:
- Don't SHOUT - use of capitals is frowned upon, and makes your message harder to read;
- Change the Subject line when starting a new topic;
- Don't post the same message to more than one list;
- Use plain text only, and avoid posting in HTML;
- Paragraphs should be less than 76 characters wide;
- When replying, edit the original message and then add your post below (bottom-posting);
- When replying to a message in a daily digest, change the subject of your reply to be the same as the individual message that you are replying to (prefixed with Re: as required) and delete all other messages from your reply;
This page explains why these guidelines matter, or you can Google for "list netiquette".
Schoolforge-UK mailing lists
Schoolforge-UK has several mailing lists, which are all currently hosted by GoogleGroups:
- Schoolforge-UK Discussions - a public list for discussing a wide range of topics related to implementing FLOSS in schools and colleges. Anyone who uses this site is warmly invited to join this list.
- Schoolforge-UK MIAS Discussions - a public list for discussing implementing FLOSS Management Information and Administration Systems for schools and colleges. Anyone interested in this topic is warmly invited to join this list.
- Schoolforge-UK Software Collaboration - a public list for participants in the Schoolforge-UK Software Collaboration project. More details here.
- Schoolforge-UK Management - a private, invitation-only list for use by members of the Executive Committee.
- Schoolforge-UK Announcements - in development. When completed, everyone who registers on this site will automatically be added to this low-traffic one-way announcement list, which will be used to notify members of the Schoolforge-UK Association about meetings and events.
Other useful mailing lists
Two mailing lists that carry much of the traffic relating to UK schools using FLOSS are:
These are both "proprietary" in a sense, although the SuSE list is a broad church, and can claim Schoolforge-UK as one of its branches.
IRC Channel
We also have an IRC channel on the Freenode network (which hosts the IRC channels for many other Free Software projects). Join #schoolforge-uk on irc.freenode.net and join in discussions of anything and everything related to FLOSS in schools.
Email notification
We are working to add the MediaWiki Email Notification feature to this site. This will provide additional options in your Preferences, which will enable you to be notified by email when a watchlisted page is changed by another user.
