As promised - a message I posted this morning to the Nonprofit Open
Source Initiative discussion list (see http://www.nosi.net for details
on NOSI). Let me know, perhaps off-list if this discussion is starting
to seem a bit off-topic, if you are interested in getting involved in
this.

Check out http://www.penguinday.org for info about Penguin Day, which
is taking place this year a day after the Nonprofit Technology
Conference (http://www.nten.org/ntc). I will be at both events and look
forward to opportunities to talk to people about Mailman usability and
replicating Yahoogroups-like functionality using open source.

Best wishes,

Tobias

-- Tobias Eigen Executive Director

Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa http://www.kabissa.org

• Kabissa's vision is for a socially, economically, politically, and
  environmentally vibrant Africa, supported by a strong network of
  effective civil society organizations. *

Begin forwarded message:

From: Tobias Eigen <tobias@kabissa.org> Date: February 17, 2005 11:51:45 AM EST To: nosi-discussion@nosi.net Subject: Re: [NOSI discussion] Same planet, different worlds

...

On a related note, how many of you will be at NTC next month and the
associated Penguin Day Chicago on the following Saturday?

Ah! So that's when it's going to be! I've been waiting for news via
penguinday.org... now I can book my flight!

...

Anyone got something really profound or eye-poppingly cool that you
want to demo, discuss, or proclaim at PD?

For Kabissa, I've been tracking and actively participating in lots of
discussions about yahoogroups and replicating the best aspects of it
using open source. I would be really interested in taking advantage of
Penguin Day to raise awareness of the need for this and to generate
momentum to raise funds, find partners and recruit developers to work
on it.

While alot of great work is being done on open source list managers
and on discussion forums/web collaboration tools, there is not much
progress being made on bringing the two together in an open source
project that can be replicated and made broadly useful by many
organizations. It's happening, but piecemeal and in the meantime it's
a shame to subject ordinary people to Mailman's web interfaces (try
accessing the private archives for the NOSI discussion list and you'll
see what I'm talking about) and to not properly take advantage of the
dynamic and empowering effect of connecting people through their
mailboxes as well as through a beautiful community Web site. For
Kabissa it's incredibly important because the people in Africa we
serve pay dearly for their Internet connection and we want to empower
them to make the most of their limited time oline.

Now there seems to be a particularly grand opportunity because a bunch
of things are coming together at the same time:

1. Mambo was awarded a Product Excellence Award at LinuxWorld this
   week (http://www.mamboserver.com) - one of the things that makes Mambo
   excellent is that it can be easily extended using optional components,
   and it's easy to create and share components
2. Opendgroups is being developed to share the functionality of the
   already successful dgroups.org service using open source (see
   http://www.opendgroups.net). One of the models being considered is a
   Mailman/Drupal integration.
3. Mailman developers are recognizing the need for making its web
   interfaces more usable (see
   http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ msg08628.html and subsequent onslaught of messages).
4. Mail2forum, a phpbb add-on that provides bidirectional email/list
   support, is now at v1.0 RC2. (http://www.mail2forum.com) - m2f
   developers claim it can be easily ported to other forums and welcome a
   project team to port it to another forum that integrates better with
   Mambo (see http://www.mail2forum.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=796).
5. Alot of reputable, open source friendly web developers are using
   Mambo - i.e. Sangonet in South Africa (http://www.sn.apc.org) and
   Picnet (http://www.picnet.net - also will be at NTC). Picnet is
   interested in developing a CAN-SPAM act compliant Mambo newsletter
   component (http://www.picnet.net). This could complement an integrated
   forum component nicely and share code with it to interact with a list
   manager like Mailman.
6. Kabissa's interest in all of this is that we want to deepen the
   impact of our programs by integrating and improving our existing
   online offerings through the development of a new integrated Web site.
   We have 850 member organizations throughout Africa that are seeking to
   make better use of ICT for the benefit of their communities, and many
   of them are hosting their Web sites and domain names on Kabissa,
   participating in our Time To Get Online training program, and finding
   each other online through our member contact directory, bulletin board
   and mailing lists. Having bidirectional functionality for newsletters
   and discussion groups integrated into our site will really help us to
   deliver on our promise to the African civil society sector. This user
   group also provides a great source of willing volunteers for pilot
   testing.
7. Kabissa is also involved in developing a community Web site for the
   Africa Democracy Forum (http://www.africademocracyforum) which
   currently interacts primarily through a Yahoo Group and face-to-face
   meetings. We are planning to work with the ADF to move their Yahoo
   Group to a Mambo-integrated forum, where we can then do alot more to
   help ADF members to interact online, discuss key topics and share
   information about opportunities. One of the key requirements for the
   forum is to have bidirectional email support, in part also to ease the
   pain of migrating from yahoogroups.

Sorry for the lengthy list - I'm throwing this out there for
discussion. I'm sure I and others on this list could come up with even
more ideas. :-) If we could bring together a group at Penguin Day to
discuss some of these different pieces of the puzzle perhaps we could
come up with a collaborative plan for producing a very useful and
broadly replicable open source product.

Cheers,

Tobias