Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>]

> So who's interested in actually working on this now and again?  We can
> keep it off-list to spare the others...

Me! Me! 

I don't think it is necessary to take this topic off-list. 

 
> (1) Granted I've only done a cursory review of the documentation, but
it
> seems that neither Mailman nor MhonArc nor Majordomo support the
addition
> of the sort of (certainly non-standard) links that we propose, at
least
> not without some hacking.  Again, though, it was a cursory review and
I'm
> not a sysadmin, so I probably have no idea what I'm talking about...

I ran into the same wall. All we need is the ability to embed a unique
identifier in the footer of each message, but mailman doesn't seem to
provide support for that....

I think the work-around is to embed a static link in the footer to a
general editor's interface. I.e., the link says something like:

"Like this email? Promote it to the website!"

In a fair and just world, you'd click on the link and it would take you
to a page that allows you to promote the email you were just reading.
But mailman doesn't provide us with the building blocks for such
functionality, it seems. The best that I think we can do is take the
editor to a page that lists recent messages and allows them to fish them
out.

 
> (2) The archives are in the public realm.  Either the archives as a
whole
> or the promotion sequence itself would need to be secured behind
.htaccess
> or some other authentication process.

When an author needs to give permission, some authentication process is
required. Else, we won't know if we really got permission. Anytime we
talk about authentication or security, it's important to remember that
we can be either very strict or very loose. We could be really strict
and require biometric authentication (fingerprint, retinal scan, etc.)
Or, we could be very loose and just do authentication through obscurity
(send the author a dynamic URI, no one else should know it, assume that
someone accessing the URI is the author.)

The InterNetWorkers archives have always been public. The archives are
really a separate entity from the 'New Web Site' effort.

 
> (3) Should the promotion announcement go only to the original author
or to
> the entire list?

I don't think it needs to go to the entire list. We could set up a
separate list (inw-editors or some such) for those that are interested.

> (4) The promotion sequence messages would have to be segregated from
the
> archival process to prevent the archives being burdened with
redundancies
> and management-oriented data.

Yeah, this is as good a reason as any to keep promotion mechanics off of
the list. 

> I think such administrative issues will pose the greatest challenge.
I
> believe it will be easiest to script/program an interface to handle
the
> splitting/passing of the parts of the email and the editing of the
content
> for publication to another archive.

Yeah, parsing email is easy and fun. I love writing parsers. But since
writing parsers is such a valuable experience, I'd be happy to see
someone else distill the joy of writing the language parser.

The promoting/editing/publishing process is a simple workflow system
that uses an email and web interface. I would strongly suggest a SQL DB
backend. Not quite as fun -- you have to deal with what Brooks calls
"accidental complexity" to get email and web playing nicely in workflow
-- but the experience is probably more valuable and relevant to other
twenty-first century projects.