[NGO] introduction and listen

[Rob Miller]

hi everyone,

i learned about the existence of this list a while ago, but then in the
craziness of getting married, moving in to a new house, and attending a
sprint in NY i forgot to start following it. i'm on the ball now,
however, and am playing catch-up.

some of you know me, already, but i'll give a brief introduction for
those who don't.  i work for The Open Planning Project (TOPP), as a
developer for the Plone-based OpenPlans website (http://openplans.org/).
this site is a free-of-charge, free-of-advertising, hosted set of
web-based group-collaboration tools that is available for anyone to use.
many of you are familiar w/ sourceforge.net, which is a free service for
folks who are managing open source software products; our goal is to
become a sourceforge-type resource for the rest of the world.  we want
anyone who has especially those related to community activism
and social change.

i've been especially interested in the discussion about the mailing list
product listen.  we've just recently deployed listen on the OpenPlans
site; in fact, we've funded most (possibly all) of the listen
development that has happened thus far.  i very much agree w/
sisi that the equivalence of web and email participation is paramount...
different people have different ways of interacting w/ information and
technology, and this offers the best of both worlds.

TOPP is planning to continue listen development.  while i hope that listen
always stays pretty simple (and i'll fight tenaciously to keep it from
becoming as byzantine and confusing as Mailman), there are a number of key
features that we can't live without: the ability to moderate
subscriptions, good bounce handling, etc.  we'd love to see others helping
with this effort, however.  i'll second limi's statement that there it's
hard to find a better developer to fund than alec mitchell; we at TOPP
feel very lucky that we've been able to get some of his time, and we hope
to be able to continue to do so.

anyway, i'm really thrilled that this list exists, and i'm even more
thrilled that there is so much activity.  Plone has been a little slow out
of the gate in really addressing the needs of the NGO community, but i
think that our technology is really quite impressive, and i think that the
next year will see a tremendous improvement in our situation.

-r

p.s.: you can read a blog post i made about the OpenPlans listen
deployment on The Plone Blog:
http://theploneblog.org/blog/archive/2006/06/28/mailing-lists-deployed-on-openplansorg