DRAFT policy proposal on mailing lists

This policy is not official and was proposed by Antonis Christofides, Dec. 2007.

Naming

The name of a list should have a core and, optionally, a -public suffix. For English speaking lists, the core should be a clear mnemonic or English word that clearly describes the purpose of (e.g. "cafe", "internals", "openstandards") or the people comprising (e.g. "board", "members") of the list. For non-English lists, the same applies, but the core can be in another language. The -public suffix must always be "-public", regardless of the language used in the list.

All mailing lists must be either:

  1. private list identifying a group of people (without any suffix); or
  2. moderated announcement-only lists with a -news suffix; or
  3. clearly marked as a public discussion space with a -public suffix; or
  4. a private place of contact with a -helpdesk suffix; or
  5. a private discussion list with a -private suffix.

Global lists

Mailing lists without suffixes are private with private archives and people can be subscribed to such lists only if they meet the membership criteria. Exceptions: every active FFII member that is interested can subscribe to "cafe", "board" does not have an archive. Board can approve additional exceptions that must be documented here.

Workgroup lists

Each workgroup (after being approved by the board) would have a core name in English (or other language, rarely). On a request from the leader of the workgroup lists with names corename-news, corename-helpdesk and corename-private would be created. For public discussions the use of discuss-public would be encouraged until the IT administrator or the leader of the workgroup decide that the traffic form the workgroup discussions overwhelms the general traffic on discuss-public, at that point corename-public could be created.

Private lists

Lists without suffixes are private and changes to their membership require approval of the IT administrator and notification of the board.

Workgroup lists with -private suffix are private and changes to their membership require approval of the workgroup leader. If technically possible the -private lists would provide encryption option at the request of the workgroup leader.

News lists

Lists with -news suffix must be moderated to ensure low-traffic and that only relevant messages are sent out. Workgroup leader or a delegate must approve a post to the -news list. Anyone can subscribe to a -news list.

Helpdesk lists

Lists with -helpdesk suffix are private, archived contact points to workgroups from non-involved people. Anyone can post. Only people that are authorized to speak on behalf of the workgroup can be subscribed to such lists. When replying to a message posted to such lists, the list must be put in CC to inform other helpdesk members of the reply and put the reply in the archive. Changes to their membership require approval of the workgroup leader.

Public discussion lists

Lists with -public suffix are public - anyone can subscribe, subscribers can post.

Administration

Only the administrators and the IT workgroup leader will have permissions to modify settings of all mailing lists, to create new mailing lists, and to remove mailing lists. System administrators will set up automated systems that will check the conformance of lists to these rules and provide list owners with relevant information about their lists on a regular basis.

Mailing lists will be monitored for traffic levels. Mailing lists with no traffic over a long period of time will be removed with an approval of either IT administrator or the workgroup leader. Lists with -helpdesk suffix will be excluded from traffic level monitoring.

Reply-To munging

Reply-To munging is strongly discouraged in any list. For the rationale about Reply-To Munging, see Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful. Read Reply-To Munging Considered Useful for a dissenting opinion.

Special lists

FFII counts with several special lists for its members. These are:

* board: intended for internal board members communications. To maintain its strict confidentiality it does not have archive, so every board member has to save its messages in its own archive. * eboard: the extended board, intended as a kind of advisory council to the board composed by core active members as decided by the board of the moment. Confidential. * verein: for communication of all the active members of the association. * cafe: just for drink, chat and fun of active members of the association. * europarl-help (to be renamed): for operative and confidential communications of the core activists working on political campaigns at the Brussels bodies. It allows non FFII members. * intern (to be created): for debate of internal issues of the association itself. Composed only by active members and confidential.

Transitional rules

Existing mailing lists must be renamed like this:

For renamed mailing lists, aliases will be set up redirecting emails to the new list. For deleted lists a bounce email will be generated directing users to a page describing all the lists and suggesting to contact sysadmins in case of a confusion.

If technically possible, effort shall be made so that the headers in the renamed lists are such that automatic sorting into folders by email clients does not break.

Rationale

A private list is a list where approval is needed for subscription. The people subscribed are normally trusted. A public list is a list where anyone can subscribe and post. In moderated lists, anyone can subscribe, but emails are held for approval. An example is news@ffii.org. Some lists can be both private and moderated, such as members@ffii.org. The purpose of this rule is to make certain that any list that is neither private nor moderated has a -public suffix, so that senders are readily warned that their emailing is public. Moderated lists don't need this, because mistakes are harder to get through, since they go through more eyes.

However lists that expect announcement-only traffic must use -news suffix to indicate to the subscribers that this is a moderated, announcement-only list that anyone can subscribe to.

Lists with -helpdesk suffix are private lists where little internal traffic is expected but such lists shall be used as contact points for projects. Any reply to an email sent to -helpdesk should CC: the same -helpdesk so that the reply is archived and so that other helpdesk people know that the email has been responded to. Use of -helpdesk suffix instead of a more generic and vague -help is to clearly show the internal procedure at a glance.

The reason the "-public" suffix must be in English is that a person often needs to send information to persons working in another language. For example, consider someone who wants to send this to the Germans:

They'd then send this email to de-offentlich, and you can imagine the consequences. So the -public suffix must be understandable by the widest audience possible, which means it must be English.

Changes to current lists

ML cafe@

Cafe is not meant to be confidental. Cafe is a place for FFII friends to chat about off-topic non-FFII stuff like flame over gas ovens vs. electric ovens. Or what is your favorite spahgetti bolognese recipe.

policies/mailing-lists (last edited 2010-01-26 01:53:52 by arebenti)

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