E-mail bulletins, discussion lists and Epistle

Creating an e-mail bulletin or discussion group

E-mail bulletins and discussion groups are a great way to provide information to people and build up a group of like-minded individuals.

To create an e-mail bulletin or discussion group on the Global Collaborative your organisation must:

• Be a member organisation of the Global Collaborative and agree to our terms of use.
  
• Send me an e-mail (jonathan.odonnell@rmit.edu.au) requesting that I set up an e-mail bulletin or discussion group.
• Build and maintain your own subscriber list.
  

I will need the following information:

• Names and contact details for at least two people who will maintain the mailing list.
• The name of the mailing list. eg Austral Peace and Security Network Bulliten (APSNet).
  
• A short name that will appear at the start of each e-mail's title or subject line. eg [APSNet]
• Whether you want people to reply to the list (a two-way discussion group) or the list is for sending information from the organisation to subscribers (a bulletin).

Please note that creating a list is not automatic. Because of this, we may restrict the number of lists that we run, or that any one organisation can run.

Once I have this information, I will let you know how to send out bulletins or messages and manage your list of subscribers.

A word about Spam

We don't like spam. If you spam people, we will close down your bulletin or discussion group. There are two main ways that you might spam people and lose your privileges:

• Invite people that you don't know to join your subscriber list.  This can easily happen if you get hold of a list of e-mail addresses from a talk you attended, for example. There is a simple test to know whether you should send someone an invitation or not.
• Have I spoken to this person, one-on-one?  If you have never spoken to them, don't spam them.
• Let anyone join your discussion group and then leave it unattended.  If you do this, you will soon have robots automatically joining your discussion group so that they can spam your subscriber list.  To prevent this, keep an eye on who is joining and what they are talking about.

We are happy to suggest ways that you can build up your subscriber list and promote discussion within your group without spamming people.

Just remember that we reserve the right to close down a group or bulletin without notice. We have to reserve this right because irresponsible action can destroy all the groups and bulletins on the Global Collaborative. Spam by one irresponsible member can cripple the whole Global Collaborative.  So don't spam.

Epistle

Epistle provides is a simple way to send an annotated list of links to your mailing list. The links can be news articles (eg APSNet) or scientific reports (eg AdaptNet), or anything else that is accessible via the Web. Using Epistle, one or more editors can work together to gather items, and then a single editor can select, edit, rearrange and send out an issue to your subscribers.

Each issue is automatically archived to your Global Collaborative Web site. If you have RSS turned on, people can also read your items via RSS and you can include them in other Web sites.

John Withers has made a nice video (Windows only) which shows how Epistle works.  You might like to have a quick look before you proceed here.

To use Epistle, you first need a mailing list (see above).  You will also need to let us know what format you wish to use for your e-mails and Web pages.  Things go quicker if you use one of the existing formats, but that is not absolutely necessary.

Once you have a mailing list, here is how you create each issue.  There are two steps:

1. First your gather the items that might be useful for your issue.
2. Then you finalise which items will go in and send it out.
   

Add Epistle items

1. Log on to the Global Collaborative.
2. Go to your Epistle folder.
• NAPSNet: private folder.
  
• APSNet: temporary folder for training.  Note that during training this is on a separate Web site, so you will need to log in again.
  
3. Use the [Add] tab to add a new issue.  This will create a folder called 'Current submission for username'.
   Please note that if you cannot see an [Add] tab it means that your site manager hasn't given you the correct permissions.  Please let them know and copy to me.
   
4. Choose [Epistle Entry] from the [Add Item] menu. You will see a form.  Use this form to capture the information about each item. Each different format for Epistle uses different fields.  Here are the fields for APSNet, for example:
• Title (required): The title of the news article or report.
• Date: Date of the article.
• Source: The name of the newspaper or publisher.
• Source URL: The Web address of the article.
• Authors: Names of the author or authors.
• [ ] Is Grouped: Used to indicate a sub-item.  See notes below.
• Article text: The quote from the article that we are using.
5. [Save] that item.
6. To add another item, just choose [Epistle Entry] from the [Add Item] menu and follow the same steps again.

Adding sub-items

Some mailing lists (eg APSNet) use an Item + Sub-item format.  The Is Grouped tick-box is the secret to making your sub-items.

1. These instructions assume that you have added at least one item, as per the instrutions above.
2. Choose [Epistle Entry] from the [Add Item] menu, as you would for a normal item.
3. Fill out the fields, as described above. 
   
4. Tick the [ ] Is Grouped box.
5. [Save] that sub-item.

You can choose what item the sub-item appears under by changing the order of the contents list. If you add them in the order that you want them to appear, you won't need to do any rearranging.

Sending out a newsletter

1. Log onto the Global Collaborative.
2. Navigate to your newsletter folder.
3. Choose the [Compose] tab.
4. You MUST change the title as your very first action on this page. Don't forget, please!  Hitting the publish button later will not update the title field.
1. Change the title in the [Title] text box.
2. Click on the [Change title] button.
5. For each item on the list, choose (publish) for the items that you want to include in this issue.  As you publish items, the previews at the bottom of the page will update to show you what your Web page and e-mail will look like. Don't forget to wait until the page has fully reloaded before you publish the next item.
   
6. As you do this, they will be appear on the page below the list of items.  Ignore how they look there.  The format that appears there is for NAPSNet.  It does not indicate how things will look on your newsletter.
   
7. Use the up and down arrows to change the order of the items.  Don't forget to wait until the page has fully reloaded before you move another item.
8. At any time, you can go into any item to correct it.
   
9. When you are ready, use the (Publish) link under the Change Title button. Two things will happen:
   
1. An e-mail will be sent to the mailing list.
2. The latest version will be added to the Web archive.
10. During testing, the e-mail will only go to the test mailing lists. Even when we go live, there is a final manual step to send the e-mail to the full list.  It is a small precaution against those "What have I just done!" moments. 
    

Notes and questions

1. How do we link to a document on the Global Collaborative (ie a relative link).  At the moment we can only do absolute links.
2. Are there any plans to fix the preview so that it reflects the format of each different newsletter.