Welcome to the World@Forum

Welcome to the shared Communications Center and Library for this specialized program under The Commons. This portion of our cooperative problem-solving process is currently handled through a free subscription arrangement with YahooGroups. It offers a number of useful capabilities which are explained briefly below. (Also see the brief Word on YahooGroups below for some qualification on their m.o.)

Active Participation?
If you intend to participate in the email exchanges with the other group members, or the posting of materials to the Library or Links & Media sections, please to be sure to read this section carefully. In addition we suggest that you give a good look at the @World Forum Toolkit which provides further background and use hints for the multiple functions and utilities offered here.

Participation and Email Frequency

Participation makes it easy to access the Public Library, link & Media and other sections of the @Forum, as well as receiving messages of the list into your own email box, in the manner you prefer. To become a member of a given group, you are invited to send an empty email to the postmaster@ecoplan.org indicating which group you wish to join, or even easier going directly to the program that interest you and clicking the Sign-In link on the menu. After a short while you will receive a confirmation, unless there is a technical problem with your address. When you have signed up you can elect to receive feedback from this site in any of three forms:
    (a) Individual emails. To receive all individual email messages.
    (b) Daily digest: To receive all emails for the day in one message.
    (c) Special notices. Only send important update emails from group moderator.
    (d) Don't send me email, I'll read the messages at the Web site at leisure.
Some of you may find one of the latter options more convenient. If you wish to leave the list at any time, just send a blank email to

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Messages Procedures & Etiquette

When you answer a group message, your answer will in many cases be sent to all the members of the list. If you wish the sender only to receive your answer, please click on the "Forward" button instead of "Respond" and copy the sender's email address into the "To" box. We would ask you to be extremely careful about distinguishing between
  1. Basically personal messages (such as a thank you note, a specific question or an observation intended for this or that person) which are best addressed to your individual correspondent, and
  2. Communications to the group as a whole.
Exception Information:
We are all asked to bear in mind that our colleagues are very busy people and we want to make sure that whatever comes out of this forum (I) they do not receive more than a handful messages a week on average and (ii), more important, that what is distributed to the group is quite literally "exception information", i.e., communications which address issues which are of high common interest. I hate to say it, but when we see people being a bit too casual in their choice of mode, our list administrator actually goes in and picks off what we think to be a bit too personal and indicate this to them as such. This may strike you as a bit priggish on our part and indeed is a bit of a bore to actually do; but we think it's better that than overloading people who have a lot of real work to do and who see this as a useful tool and not one more wasteful Internet chore.

How many messages should YOU be posting to the group? Certainly no more than one or two per week. Thank you. In exceptional cases let's get together and figure out a strategy (since there are other options including our several "cafés".)

Copying content of earlier communications! Please do not simply copy and pass on the content of all previous communications. Nobody, nobody likes to wade through this stuff. Moreover, it obscures the point of your message for those whose time is important. Where you need to cite an earlier note for context purposes, please do this in a sparing and structured way ("judicious snipping" we call it). We will all appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Retaining Subject Headings: Once a discussion of any given topic has got underway, it helps retain the original subject heading. (This is because this heading in one of the main ways in which we can recall any given dialogue and exchange around that topic, a process of recall which we believe is extremely important to the extent to which this collective intellectual patrimony is available to be mined for subsequent uses. Likewise, if you note that the subject heading is preceded by a FWD: or Re: in any given case, it's a good idea to delete this so that your message will enter into the correct repertory.)

Other guidelines to keep in mind:

  1. Proof-read your submissions. The time you take is magnified 300-fold in time savings by readers in trying to understand your points.
  2. Don't send very long messages, papers, or binary files to the list; rather, post a summary in straight text, offering to send to those requesting it the longer or coded document. Such requests should always be OFF-LIST (to the personal offering it, not the whole list). Another popular alternative is to point people to a website with your material.
  3. If you feel yourself getting heated about what another has written, consider sending that to only that person, not the entire list. This keeps the recipient from feeling as defensive and possibly escalating the exchange into a conflagration.
  4. When referring to research or statements, try to cite them, either a bibliographic or web reference.
  5. In a reply, don't include the entire contents of the other's message, only the part you are commenting on. If your point is more general, consider only restating in summary point the comments of another (be careful to be accurate and not self-serving). Also, make sure you are replying to the correct party, the whole list (probably what your mail program will assume when you hit the "reply" button), or to the individual, which will require you to clip the sender's e-mail address before hitting "reply" and then pasting it in over the pednet address before starting to compose your reply. Remember, there is no feeling so "sinking" as when a personal message goes instead to 300 people.
  6. After joining, don't post for a couple weeks, so that you can get a sense of the style of the list. Your first post might contain a short (one para.) introduction of yourself, but this is not required (when lists first start, introductions are the best way to get things started).
  7. When passing on something from your word processor, please avoid the straight cut-and-paste approach, as you will bring non-standard characters and spacing with it, especially lines that are too long. Rather, change to courier 12-pitch type and then save it to ASCII format (*.txt), closing it, and then using the Notebook editor to bring it onto your screen again. Quickly proofread it for format, and then cut-and-paste it to your mail-program screen.

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List Monitoring

For better or worse, this is a "monitored" list. We do this, not because we like it, and certainly not because we enjoy playing that role, but in order to protect our subscribers and work partners from various forms of abuse and e-overload. On the one hand, we provide an additional screen to help protect from various forms of spam that occasionally manage to get through the generally pretty good YahooGroups controls. And in addition, we occasionally find ourselves constrained to reject letters that have been penned perhaps a bit too aggressively for our taste, or simply send out a reminder in instances in which someone has either sent to the group a communication that would be better routed to a specific individual, or loaded down his note with unnecessary encumbering copied material. Every once in a while we may unintentionally strike a nerve, but by and large this seems to work so we'll keep on doing it.

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A Closing Word on YahooGroups

For the last several years we have been using first eGroups, then YahooGroups as the supporting platform for this central communications and information storage function. We chose to do this because we felt they provided useful functionality in support of our independent cooperative program, and because it was free (bearing in mind that we carry out all these programs under The Commons without any form of external financial support... so money is scarce). The only shortcoming of this arrangement is the publicity messages and the need to sign in, but this has been judged by most of our colleagues as a bearable inconvenience under the circumstances.

On the other hand, you may have some better ideas for us. We know we can do better and want to hear from you. So if you have leads, free storage space or funds, don't be shy.

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Last updated on 6 July 2004