The work described below was completed in November 2015.
- Improve service. Higher availability. Faster delivery. Improved reliability. Improve searchability.
- Improve archive. All messages archived at SourceForge will be archived at Google Groups.
- Improve branding. Old lists were @sourceforge.net. New lists will be @googlegroups.com
- Simplify the lists. Seven lists at SourceForge will be retired. Three new lists will take the place of the seven:
vivo-techfor all things technical. Discussion, questions regarding development, system admin, ontology, ingest, apps and tools.vivo-communityfor all things community. Planning, project management, outreach, engagement, trainingvivo-allfor announcements. Will include tech, community, governance groups and people subscribed directly tovivo-all. Not a discussion list. Used for announcements only.
Changes will occur in November 2015. Methods used by Dspace for a recent, similar conversion will be followed. Dspace had more lists, more users and more messages to archive.
SourceForge counts are as of September 3, 2015.
| Old List | New List | Subscribers | Messages |
|---|---|---|---|
| vivo-announce | vivo-all | 60 | 12 |
| vivo-community-all | vivo-community | 2 | 2 |
| vivo-dev-all | vivo-tech | 262 | 5,758 |
| vivo-imp-issues | vivo-tech | 202 | 1,093 |
| vivo-ontology | vivo-tech | 147 | 592 |
| vivo-outreach | vivo-community | 27 | 9 |
| vivo-release-test | vivo-tech | 31 | 36 |
- Existing private Google Groups. Governance groups (leadership and steering) will be subscribed to
vivo-all. Thirteen other private Google Groups will be considered for automatic subscription tovivo-all - Existing public Google Groups. VIVO Community will be the foundation for the new community list. It has 332 members.
- Conference email. The VIVO conference maintains a list of past and potential conference attendees. These will be considered for subscription to
vivo-all. - CRM contacts. Duraspace maintains a list of VIVO contacts with email addresses. These will also be considered for inclusion in
vivo-all.
Q: Why do the email addresses look like vivo-tech@googlegroups.com rather than tech@vivoweb.org? We have steering-group@vivoweb.org.
A: steering-group@vivoweb.org is a private group. vivo-tech@googlegroups.com is a public group. A public group has public archives and self-subscribe. These features are not available with the vivoweb.org domain name via Google.
Q: In the Dspace conversion, how many users, how many lists, how many messages? This will help us guage how much effort will be involved in converting the VIVO lists.
A: The Dspace lists were about 10 times bigger. Entire job took two weeks. Google limits migrations to 100 users per day, and 10,000 messages per day. But for VIVO, that's no more than three days, so quite possible.
Q: Were the Dspace lists combined, renamed?
A: Renamed, yes. Combined, no. But should be possible to migrate two sourceforge lists to one Google Group to combine archives.
Q: How does resubscribe, unsubscribe work? Both for automated processes and for individual users?
A: GoogleGroups (at least the public ones) provide two ways to subscribe/unsubscribe. You visit the public list page and click "Join List" (or Remove). Or you send an email to [listname]+subscribe@googlegroups.com (or +unsubscribe). All people currently subscribed to the lists will be subscribed to the new lists automatically. There will be no need to resubscribe.
Q: Lists were turned off during conversion? How long was any one list off? What did users experience when lists were off?
A: Only as users were being subscribed. And only the list that was new and not already in use. So should not be noticeable to the users.