Hello Mailman Developers,

Some of you may be aware of an Internet2 sponsored and NSF funded effort to improve the integration of popular open source mailing list software with emerging middleware technologies for identity management and authorization.

http://middleware.internet2.edu/mlist

The mlist working group of Internet2 has been gathering information related to mailing list software needs of higher education and working on integration scenarios for mailing list software related to these needs.

As part of this effort, we have put together much of the knowledge we have gathered over the past year into a how-to guide for mailing list developers.

http://webapp.lab.ac.uab.edu/wiki/mlist/index.php/HomePage

Our initial version of this guide has been put together over the past few weeks in the hopes that it is useful to the Mailman developers in light of the upcoming Mailman developer sprint at PyCon2005. We hope that it will contribute positively to the development requirements of the next major release of Mailman.

As I mentioned, this is our initial version of the document. We have put it online as a wiki in order to solicit feedback on the utility of the information and to allow people to easily contribute to this discussion.

Please let us know if you find this information useful or if there are areas you feel should be improved. Our goal is to provide requirements guidance to mailing list system developers to help promote the changing needs of the higher education community. We feel that these same requirements represent the future needs of many organizations that use Mailman and that by addressing the general requirements Mailman will continue to be a popular and adaptable part of future mailing list systems.

Thanks for your time and let me know if you have any questions or requests.

Thanks,

~jpr