Collaboration and ABCD
On June 6th, Ian Stokes-Rees made a post to the ABCD mailing list, broaching the idea of moving ABCD mailing lists to Google Groups.
His post started me thinking about collaborative technologies and how we use them at Harvard and I thought it might be useful to continue that discussion by putting it on my blog, Technobabble.
Readers of the blog can easily make brief comments, or link to their own online resources. More importantly, the “conversation” will remain online and intact so that ABCDers can follow it at their leisure.
Please feel free to share your thoughts as comments, or if you have something more substantive than a comment to add, forward it to me and I’ll post it as an article.
WordPress doesn’t make it easy to display comments by default, so to read the comments or add one of your own, click on the number or chat bubble in the upper-right corner of the post.
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Thanks for your interest, and enjoy the discussion!
Sincerely,
Ian Stokes-Rees’ post:
Having just signed up for some more ABCD mailing lists, the thought struck me that perhaps ABCD should consider moving the mailing lists to Google Groups. I realize the major complicating factor is probably that Google Groups have no concept of “ABCD membership” to pre-authorize any subscription requests.
As someone (I suppose like all of us) who has too much email coming into my inbox, I need to manage when I see content from mailing lists (and a few procmail SNAFUs have made me wary of playing constantly with procmail). Google Groups has the best archive searching and user-side list management control features that I’ve seen (e.g. I can subscribe to a list, but then request not to get any emails, and only review the content online).
Has someone registered a “harvard.edu” Google Apps area? If so, it has LDAP support and could perhaps be used to setup mailing lists which would understand pre-authorization.
Anyway, I imagine this is more work than anyone has time to consider, but I thought I’d throw the idea out there.
Ian
Jim
July 15, 2011 @ 8:24 pm
I’m not sure about the registration. But a locally hosted forum would address some of the Google Groups shortcomings. There are many, many options, such as Simple Machines or Drupal. Local forums have security and flexibility, and much more. Some even allow email notifications, and even posting by email!
andy mcmurry
July 25, 2011 @ 11:02 am
We had a similar need in the open source informatics community so we purchased hardware+software+support.
After 5+ years of duplicating infrastructure with separate logons we pooled.
We have Mailman, Confluence Wiki, Jira bug tracking, Bamboo build server, and Subversion.
Single Sign On provided with CROWD.
–andy
Kevin Laitinen
July 25, 2011 @ 11:22 am
I believe that Google Groups gives you the best of both worlds. You can subscribe to a group and then never actually go to the group site. It can all be done through email. You can even choose email frequency or non at all. I also use Gmail which makes threaded conversations and makes reading group emails even easier. I would think that it would also be possible to add a mailing list email address to the group so that all posts sent to the group would also be sent out through the mailling list. Google groups is also free. Just my 2 cents from HMS IT.