[Openaaq-discuss] Getting back on track

[<ap...@te...>]

Hi, everyone,

I've enjoyed a lot of procrastination since AAQ went open source. I apologize
for that. It's been an up and down year. 

I'd like to get back on track with OAAQ, starting with setting some priorities.
(I don't want to own the least active project on SourceForge.)

I'd like to start a discussion on how email is used. I think AAQ is better to
participating staff than to some segments of the question posting public. At
least when I consider the student base at the college I work at, who I'm sure
abandon five Hotmail accounts by age sixteen, and have a Yahoo account for chat,
a Netscape account for no good reason and are still not forced by administration
to use their institutional accounts (an annoyance to us staff).

Jacob Neilson, at his useit.com site had a column about announcement lists used
by both presidential campaigns: http://useit.com/alertbox/20040920.html

Neilson (who made me smirk by claiming that the Clinton campaign made all the
changes he recommended in a 1996 column of the same theme -- and their candidate
won!) has some good points about how to handle rostering email addresses. I
actually signed up for notices about future columns, and now have copies of
their confirmation and welcome messages. 

Optionally, a user could enter their email address with every post, like they do
at Go Ask Alice: http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/ (And a happy tenth birthday
to Alice, it's an impressive service.)

The question posting code is begging to be rewritten, and is the time to add new
requirements to the specification. For that matter, is it time to start
rewriting the specification for the whole project? I'm collecting ideas.


Alex