[Listwork] Offer to Volunteer [was: Archives of private lists before July 2004 & Introduction]

[Anthony]

> Thanks for this kind offer. This is very appreciated, and you're very
> welcome to help out. Unfortunately, most things do require password
> access... However, there's also at least two important tasks which do
> not require a password:

Thanks for the reply, Alster. Sorry about the delay in replying but I 
was sick and as I (slowly) recovered was busy dealing with more urgent 
tasks that had to be dealt with more quickly.

> (1) Determining mailing lists which have been forgotten about,
> contacting their admins, contacting their subscribers, and reporting
> back to listworks task tracker at listwork at sos.indymedia.org

Is this work based on the slack list admins report that comes through 
listwork every so often?

> (2) Replying to people who send email to the listwork mailing list
> (listwork at lists.indymedia.org) or the mailman mailing list
> (mailman at lists.indymedia.org) instead of the listwork task tracker
> (listwork at sos.indymedia.org) or the relevant IMC contact, asking them to
> resend their emails to the right address.

I can do that easily enough. I see that you already have a stock 
response for such misdirected emails.


> There's surely a couple more tasks which are so time consuming that they
> are currently de facto stopping longer term listworkers from fixing
> those issues which should have been fixed a long time ago or from even
> taking measures to reduce their future work load.
> 
>> I don't have any experience running a production server though my 
>> GNU/Linux skills are quite good. I run Mandriva on my laptop and an old 
>> desktop which has been configured as a NFS / Samba server along with 
>> Apache for testing web applications. I've also played around with 
>> Postfix but wouldn't count that as experience. I also have a user ssh 
>> login for the server where indymedia.ie is hosted and perform basic 
>> regular maintenance functions (e.g. retrieving MySQL dumps for backup 
>> purposes).
> 
> In this case, and if you can in fact spend a bit of time _regularly_, I
> think setting up a system account for you would be a good idea in fact,
> don't you think? Most commands we run are actually scripted, and you
> just enter a single line as described on the
> https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/ListWorkHowto

In principle, I'm actually against the idea of giving any kind of 
password or responsibility to somebody who hasn't already demonstrated a 
level of competence, reliability, trustworthiness and commitment to a 
particular area of work / activity. For most people in the listwork 
working group, I would be an unknown quantity though people could verify 
my bona fides by checking through the archives of the Indymedia Ireland 
(general, editorial and tech) lists.

However, Indymedia Ireland recently adopted a new constitution along 
with new structures to make it easier for people to become involved and 
to allow us to grow into a stronger, healthier, more productive, and 
more inclusive voluntary organisation. 
https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/IMCEireInternetConstitution

As part of this process, working groups were created which would 
communicate in their area using their own mailing list. Some of this is 
experimental and may not work but we think it's worth making the effort.
https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/IMCEireWorkingGroups

Much of the success of this new (though elements of it have been debated 
regularly over the course of the past two years) initiative depends on 
the new email lists for the working groups being set up and running as 
soon as possible.

Accordingly, I've recently requested three new lists and three name 
changes. If I had a password, I could put these requests into practice 
straight away. :-)

More importantly, I'm also happy to commit to spending once a week 
(probably weekends) resolving some of the pending Listwork requests in 
the SOS system. I've read through the Listwork How-To at 
https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/ListWorkHowto and it all seems 
fairly straightforward.

-- 
Anthony
(One of the Indymedia Ireland volunteers)