Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

I've been thinking and tinkering with solutions to achieve true forums / listserv integration for a long time now, along with many other techies working to network large groups of people. The idea is that an online forum (or bulletin board) could coexist with a listserv (a traditional mailing list), transparently integrated.

The need for this is clear. Some users prefer mailing lists, and use their email inboxes to filter and store inbound email from mailing lists. Others prefer online forums, where they can visit a site and read discussion threads or post responses. In some cases, a forum is preferable (especially when there are multiple, distinct threads of conversation that evolve considerably in their own directions), while in other cases, a mailing list is the better option (where there are fewer threads, or threads aren't excessively developed over time).

Increasingly, however, the lines between these two are blurring. I've often posted something to a mailing list and wondered if I would have received more responses if it had been a forum. What if someone came across that posting next month, and responded to it with useful ideas or suggestions? Similarly, if something's posted on a forum, I wonder sometimes if it would have elicited more of a response in a mailing list, where many users would have received and read it, instead of possibly missing it on a forum site. Some networks move from one type of dialog (or multilog) to another very quickly.

A step towards a solution would be a system where a user could choose their preference...forum or email. If something is posted to the mailing list, it would automatically be added to the forum. If something is posted to the forum, it would automatically be sent out to the mailing list. This would allow some people to interact with the network in forum format, while others would interact with it via email.

Drupal, thankfully, is moving towards this kind of implementation with the mailhandler module. For an overview of my work towards configuring the mailhandler module on a standard drupal installation to integrate with a listserv, you'll want to visit my mailhandler tutorial.