Hi Ambassadors, and welcome to the new Ambassador-announce-l mailing list. This new list is not a discussion list like the Google Group, it is an announcement list in which important information will be emailed to you. That means:

1) Posts here will be infrequent (likely not more than 1-2 messages a week).

2) Anything posted here is critical information, and thus you should read it carefully.

As a member of the Ambassador program, you are expected to be subscribed to this list. All messages sent to it will be publicly archived.

We've made this decision based on the on-wiki discussion prompted by our moderation change and based on a random survey that went out to a selected group of ambassadors who hadn't weighed in on-wiki. There is a strong feeling among several Ambassadors that the Google Group is effective at being a discussion group for Ambassadors, but many others feel the volume is too great and they'd like to unsubscribe. Since we're trying to both foster Ambassador discussions while convey important information, splitting the group into two seemed like a logical step.

We encourage you to discuss things we post to the announce list -- but please do so on the Google Group or on-wiki, which are our discussion spaces. We have turned off moderation for the Google Group; if you feel like a discussion is dragging on too long, we encourage you to attempt to move it on-wiki organically as the list has functioned in the past. Going forward, all members of the Ambassador Steering Committee will have management rights over the group, and it will be up to you, the Ambassadors, to decide if any more changes are warranted.

From this moment on, subscription to and participation in the Google Group is entirely voluntary. If you'd like to unsubscribe to the Google Group, you are welcome to do that. Here's three ways you can unsubscribe:

1) In the email you received when you originally were added to the group is a unique URL that you can click to unsubscribe from the group.

2) If you have a Google account associated with the email address you're subscribed to, log in at groups.google.com and you'll be able to unsubscribe yourself through the web interface. You can also simply change your settings to "no email" so that you can log on and read messages through the web interface if you'd like.

3) If you can't figure either of these out, please email LiAnna at ldavis@wikimedia.org to be removed from the list manually.

Many thanks to all Ambassadors who participated in the discussion surrounding email communications!

The Public Policy Initiative Team