Part I: Getting Set Up: Overview


IDRC: Resources: Books: Catalogue: From Workplace To Workspace

Part I: Getting Set Up

Overview

What Mailing Lists Are and How They Work

Email is the simplest and most readily available form of online communication. Because email concepts correspond closely to regular postal mail, even people who have never used the Internet before can learn email fundamentals and quickly become comfortable. From there, it's not too daunting to be part of a group working together using a mailing list.

Mailing lists allow any number of people with email addresses to communicate amongst one another on issues of common interest. A mailing list is an automatic message-sending program that stores a list of the email addresses of all the people interested in a particular discussion. Participants "subscribe" to the list. If they decide they no longer want to receive messages from the list, they can "unsubscribe". Each discussion has its own email address (e.g., devel-l@american.edu). Each time a message is posted to the list address, everyone subscribed to the mailing list receives it.

How People Are Using Them

Groups can do just about everything they do face-to-face using a mailing list, and often more. Here are just a few examples:

a number of independent community economic development officers in South America and Eastern Africa are linked to each other to share strategies and develop policy documents together
a rainforest sustainability program officer from a donor agency keeps in touch with local officers and researchers at several rainforest field stations
in advance of a continental meeting on development and gender, concerned individuals and experts from around the world discuss key issues and collaborate on proposals to be presented at the face-to-face conference
a board of directors carries on between-meeting discussions and develops the next meeting agenda
a fundraising working group for an international environmental research organization shares leads, tactics and develops funding proposals together.

Why Choose a Mailing List?

There are many different types of online group collaboration tools: basic email, WWW-based conferencing systems, newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), video and audio-conferencing, and Intranets, for example. Your group may want to explore some of these other methods if they are readily available to all of you. Regardless of the tool you choose, you'll need to facilitate your group's use of it. This guide focuses on mailing lists because they are an inexpensive, universal collaboration tool that anyone with an email account anywhere in the world can use.

What You Need to Get Started

Successful mailing lists share these elements:

a group that is committed to using email regularly for working together

a facilitator to pull everything together and keep it moving

a plan for how the list should work

You'll also need to find an Internet Service Provider that offers a mailing list service -- most do!

There are different types of mailing list software, the most commonly used being: Majordomo, ListProc and Listserv. Which you have access to depends on your Internet service provider. (An Internet Service Provider is the computer network you connect to where your email account resides.) From a user/subscriber perspective, these different programs all perform similar subscription and message management functions, but each has unique commands and tools for doing so.

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