[sugar] [OLPC library] Things I would like taken away from the wiki: Sign-up lists

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:54 PM, FFM <ffm at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 04:23:04PM -0400, Seth Woodworth wrote:
>> There are few policies that we've been implementing from time to time on the
>> wiki that I would like to see go away.  It's my belief that these policies
>> are hard to maintain, ill-scalable, and unsupportable as-is.  I suggest that
>> we retire the following:
>>
>> == Sign up lists ==
>> * Lists where people are encouraged to sign up to do a task or contribute to
>> a given project.
>>
>> There are several projects and pages that suggest that you sign-up to help
>> do '$variable'.  There are several problems with this idea.
>>
>> There is no automatic mechanism in place to communicate to users who sign up
>> on a list.  If I wanted to send a message to this list, I would have to wade
>> through User_talk: pages and communicate with each person individually each
>> time I want to make an announcement.  This is compounded by the fact that
>> many users don't sign the page or add a link to their user page, and merely
>> type their names.

+1

> We can say "sign with ~~~~".

We need a registration page for each of these tasks, one that requires
entry of contact information in a way that lets an administrator send
mail to every participant. If we allow people to sign up for different
roles in a task, we need to have ways for administrators to query a
database for people of different roles. I want to be able (just as an
example) to send something to all Opportunistic Localizers for Kreyol
without extensive manual maintenance and frequent dead ends.

>> I feel that a projects should have open task lists or joining a list or some
>> other mechanism than a sign up list.  Alternatively, if someone were to
>> create a bot or tool that makes this ad-hoc list broadcasting function
>> (including making sure people are notified via email), I would be ecstatic.
>
> Such bots are in existence on the english wikipedia, they are also open source.

Link?

> The issue is that people don't know how easy it is to start a lists.l.o mailing
> list, we need to make that more obvious. That could fix much of this issue.

I would like to see lists right away supporting localizers, teachers,
students, and OLPC-<country> in each supported language, starting with
Spanish (where we have OLPC-Sur), French, Portuguese, Arabic, and
other languages of multiple target countries. Also languages mainly of
single target countries (Khmer, Kreyol, Kinyarwanda, Amharic, Pashto,
Dari...) but I leave that question to the speakers of those languages.

> -FFM
>
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