Migration of user community to OASIS lists

[Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>]

With the establishment of DITA 1.0 as an OASIS standard, the administration
at OASIS will prepare new mailing lists for DITA.  Typically, the dita-dev
domain would serve to host the same kind of activity as what we have
presently in the Yahoo! dita-users list.  We need to think about how to
migrate our current Yahoo list members over to the chosen OASIS list.

Advantages of the OASIS list:
* permanence of the material
* generally better server reliability
* isolation from spam.  Some users say they will not use Yahoo! because of
that tool's vulnerability to generating spam lists.
* shepherding of discussions within the body that also hosts the Standard
* close relationship with related materials
* follows the same example as other OASIS standards and their communities

Issues with moving the list:
* breaking all the existing URLs to the Yahoo! dita-users community.
Mitigation: This is a bona fide headache.  We will leave a posting about
the relocation of the activity, but all those published Yahoo! URLs will
take time to change over.
* some won't know to make the change. Many of the subscribers there are
"read-only" subscribers--they elect not to receive email of any sort.
Mitigation: Leave a posting about the relocation of the activity.
* loss of some collaborative facilities, particularly posting documents and
files.  Mitigation: we can still use the Yahoo list's files facility for
now; move to OASIS facilities once they become available.
* loss of profiles for users. Mitigation: is this really a problem?
Personally, the administration takes a lot of my time--I can let this go.
* other?

Let's have some discussion about pros and cons (and mitigation ideas), and
then look at when to start preparing the list users for a move.

Regards,
--
Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
11501 Burnet Rd., MS 9037D018, Austin TX 78758
Ph. 512-838-8550   (T/L 678-8550)

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
        --T.S. Eliot