oslist will end soon -- it's time to deliberate, decide and act

Michael Herman michael at michaelherman.com
Wed Dec 1 09:47:39 PST 2010


gather round oslisters, and bring your keyboard!

i'm just off the phone with boise state about the end of oslist on their
servers.

here is what we know...

1. the oslist will cease to exist in its current form not later than june of
next year.
2. boise state is migrating their own lists to googlegroups
3. boise state is NOT migrating any archives (so we're on our own with that)
4. our archives will be delivered to us on a single CD
5. they will be in the form of 150 monthly log files (roughly, 12 months x
12 years)
6. these monthly files can be read easily in any text editor
7. they can be read less easily when opened directly in a web browser
application
8. the BEST way to keep the archives and the list going is another l-soft
listserv host org
9. finding another listserv host organization is something anyone can help
with... now!
10. we already have oslist at googlegroups.com set up, so that's available
if/when we want to use it

that said...

i propose again that we think of the OSLIST in two pieces, past and future,
an archive and an ongoing conversation.  if we can find another listserv
customer to adopt us, that solves both pieces.

if not, then we need to talk here about options for each piece:

1. what sort of access is required for the archives?  is it enough to make
them available online some place, as a giant set of text files (zipped up,
they total 75MB)? do they need to be browsable/searchable online or just
downloadable for research mining purposes?  what does anyone think about
raising community money year after year to sustain them in their current
browsable form?  for the techies in our midst... if you want to think of
creative, non-listserv solutions for hosting the archive in a way that it
can stay permanently (whatever that means) accessible for searching, i.e.
convert archive text files to something browsable, you can download a sample
monthly log file here... http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist.log9904

2.  as for the ongoing conversation, the best solution might be a
googlegroup.  yahoogroup might be a close second.  what other ways are there
out there on the web that might support our ongoing community conversation?
should we leave threaded email altogether?  should we leave archiving aside
and all join facebook?  (yikes!)  should we learn to converse in
140-character tweets?  migrate to a forum at the ning site?  should we turn
our convesations into a os-pedia using the same software as wikipedia
(probably better for organizing information than for actual convesation).
where should we take the oslist heart of our many global conversations?

while we're having a chat about these two things, anyone and everyone is
invited to check this list...
http://www.lsoft.com/customers/customers.asp...to see if you know any
of these organizations well enough that you could
approach them yourself to inquire if they would adopt our list into their
system.  if you have an org to approach, then i can get you the technical
details they'll want to know about our list, so they know what they'd be
taking on.  you would just need to make the IT contact and ask the
question.  finding another listserv customer to adopt us is the FIRST BEST
solution.  we might buy the service or license the software ourselves, but
as noted in previous emails, that is not cheap and must be paid annually.

we have until june, but we've been strongly advised to do this as soon as
possible... cuz migration and set-up will take some time, out of our
control, and it would be good to be up and running in a new location for
some time, with forwarding pointers from the old site.   but those pointers
will disappear in june, too.

so where should we go from here?  and who knows any of those listserv
customers?

m


--

Michael Herman
Michael Herman Associates

http://MichaelHerman.com
http://RonanParkTrail.com
http://ManorNeighbors.com
http://ChicagoConservationCorps.org
http://OpenSpaceWorld.org

312-280-7838 (mobile)

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