Onlinegroups.net in the news
The NZ Herald has just published an article about GroupServer, a GPL open-source system for email based group collaboration. I’ve used the system for several years now (along with a number of others) and it’s been fascinating watching it mature.
The things I really like about it are the ability to send posts through the web interface, the centralised user management across multiple groups, and the way it strips email attachments and puts them in a file repository and provides a link to the file.
The way the system is implemented also encourages you, when you set up a group, to think carefully about group membership, what sort of behavior is acceptable/encouraged, and how much facilitation/moderation you’ll need to do. Most of the groups I run are private groups (invite only, the rest of the world can’t see them), because they’re for various committees I’m on etc. I’ve found that doing this thinking up front, and agreeing on expectations, has really paid off in terms of the way the group functions online.
It’s also interesting to see how heavily the Canterbury Public Issues forum is being used in the run up to local body elections. I was skeptical about whether this would work at first, but the politicians are all on there, going at the issues in full public view. From what I understand they’re listening to all the non-politicians in the group, and because of the email format, they’re making much more considered, open responses than you get in mainstream media.
More info on the system/service itself is at www.onlinegroups.net
September 21st, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Huge congrats to the OnlineGroups/GroupServer folks for some well deserved attention.
When I stumbled into GS via an introduction from Dan Randow while on a speaking trip to NZ, I thought I had finally found the holy grail. A tool that that truly combined e-mail lists and web forums that you could run on your own domain. Now you could argue they are close to further combining the attributes of a mass multieditor blog.
With E-Democracy.Org and our focus on local Issues Forums, we came to realize that if you chose web versus e-mail you’d lose half your audience. You can’t do that locally and still run an inclusive forum. This particularly true with community leaders and journalists who really live in their email box and tend to only notice what hits them in the forehead.
What GS and OnlineGroups needs are more users and organizations willing the invest in their open source approach. So jump in with us.
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
P.S. If folks outside tha Canterbury region are reading this, why not start an Issues Forum of your own. See: http://e-democracy.org/if