One flaw in an otherwise good plan for a  group is that it may be
vulnerable to "spamming."  Thus it is necessary for the moderator to
screen the first 1 or 2 messages someone posts.  Is this like a Yahoo
group?  I belong to a couple of Yahoo groups and find them very
useful.  There was, however, a rash of unrelated messages being
posted until the moderators took to screening first postings.  These
groups started small with known members and then increased in size,
slowly.  Thus this screening option was easily done.  I do not know
how this would work with such a large already existing group.  Can
you batch load the current members with an invitation to join.  Once
all the original members of the listsev are in, then new joiners are
reviewed for first posting?  Is this a problem for Google Groups?

Bob
xxxxxx@umich.edu

On Feb 14, 2006, at 11:24 AM, Mauneel Desai wrote:

After suggesting about the Google group last week, I got many
responses and most of them were positive. Some people were worried
about a few things and I will try to clear it out in this e-mail.

1. Google Group doesn’t take away the option of e-mail from people
who would still prefer e-mail. You can always select the option of
receiving e-mails so that whenever someone posts a response/question,
you can receive an e-mail.

2. Google also lets you receive e-mail alerts based on keywords. For
example, if certain staff members are interested in receiving any e-
mails that discusses Federal Demonstration Partnership, they can
choose to do so and for other messages, they can visit the group.

3. The best part is that a group will reduce a lot of duplicate e-
mails. For example rather then sending an e-mail for the same
question that has been discussed several times in the past, they can
search the group and get a response to their question. As time goes
by, there will be several common questions which would already have
been answered several times.

4. Another great advantage is that when new members join, the can
easily go and search through the groups and they would have the same
access to the information as other members who joined several months
ago. Currently, if new people subscribe to a listserv, they don’t
have any access or knowledge of the valuable information that was
discussed in the past on the listserv. They only gain knowledge about
what would be discussed after they subscribe to the listserv. Again,
this leads to several duplicate e-mails. It is much easier to search
for the information within the group (powered by Google search).

Please let me know if you still have questions. If everyone agrees
to, we can move to a Google group rather then having a listserv.

--
Mauneel D Desai
Research Specialist, Information Systems
Project Coordinator, RiSC
Team Leader
Office of Vice Chancellor for Research
University of Illinois @ Chicago
Ph: (312) 413 - 7713

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