About our Mailing List
by Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)
Instead of having our mailing list through Ubuntu Lists, we have it through Launchpad. There are a lot of advantages to having this setup, but before I outline those, I would like to explain what goes on the mailing list. Every week, I forward the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter on to the mailing list with a quick little comment about our recent blog post like I am probably going to do soon. I also forward the Kernel Team newsletter on, although before I started doing this, I sent an email to the list explaining this. This might change in the future. Along with the newsletters, I send details about our next meeting 2 weeks and 24 hours(to clear up confusion, two seperate emails, one 2 weeks before and one 24 hours before) before our next monthly meeting describing the details such as the agenda and general encouragement to participate. I will make a blog post next week describing our monthly meeting process, because next week is when I do the prep either way. Also, if members have questions about the LoCo, this is the place to ask them and get feedback, such as the planning for our Xenial Xerus release party.
Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using Launchpad for our mailing list:
Advantages:
- When a new member joins the team, they already have a Launchpad account, and it is easy to subscribe
- When a new member joins the Launchpad team, they can subscribe to the mailing list while joining
- The archives are organized well, with many useful features for viewing them
- I can see who is subscribed and how many members, with links to their Launchpad pages
- I can easily view scrubbed HTML attachments
Disadvantages:
- It is not on an *.ubuntu.com domain
- The mailing list archives can be a bit slow to show up on the page for this, although it has gotten better and it is being addressed
- This isn't necessarily traditional for a LoCo to do, as far as I know
- It isn't approved by the LoCo Council (yet)
Although it has it's downsides, using Launchpad for our mailing list has been very smooth for us and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, in my honest opinion. So we will continue to use it.
This concludes the blog post about our wiki page. If you have any questions/comments/concerns about this blog post or the mailing list, please contact Simon Quigley or stop by #ubuntu-us-wi on Freenode.