Hi all, I support Chris' arguments and I would add some points.
As administrator of the chapters mailing list I think that the best is to recover some "historical memory", which is never regrettable. Considering that we are going to celebrate several year of birthday of Wikipedia or of Wikimedia projects, I think that the "historical memory" is more than an asset.
I personally can support the creation of a mailing list like this for several reasons:
1) the chapters mailing list is closed for a specific reason 2) users groups cannot be accepted for a specif reason, even if there is a strong pressure 3) The chapters mailing list is hard to maintain because, as closed mailing list, the update and the verification requires time and workload, and this workload is manageable only if there is a limited number of subscriptions
The chapters mailing list exists *only* to assure a neutral (and this word makes sense) and a "demilitarized zone" to discuss and to announce the selection of the WMF's board members assigned to the chapters.
I would not open here a long discussion about the process or about the assignments to the chapters of these two seats (not all WMF board members are selected by the community), the chapters are considered as a stakeholder and the chapters asked to have a place like this. So please discuss in other places this item.
So the point 1) is justified.
The users groups cannot be accepted until the users groups cannot participate in this selection because the main aim of the mailing list is exactly that. So the point 2) is justified.
I personally can assure that to keep this place "neutral" there is a long verification of the eligibility of the members and it requires a lot of time.
The chapters mailing list has very low traffic because is used also to make some announcements (for instance the Wikimedia Conference) because not all chapters members follow Wikimedia-l.
Except these two utilization, there are nothing else.
At this point I would correct my sentence and I would say that: "I personally can support the creation of a mailing list" but I would add "not a twin of the chapters mailing list".
A closed and limited mailing list will be a simple replication of the chapters mailing list except the big workload to manage more subscriptions. It makes sense and can complete the chapters mailing list only if it is "open" and "transparent". Anyone who would open an user group can follow it, any chapters who would use the chapters mailing list for a use different to the main one, would be addressed to the open mailing list.
And as personal hint I suggest to keep it open because the management of a close mailing list with a high number of eligible subscribers may require a lot of time and verification.
Kind regards
On 19.10.2015 21:12, Chris Keating wrote:
Looking at the current (private) chapters' list, for at least a year 90%+ of the traffic has been announcements that were cross-posted to Wikimedia-l. The other 10% is invitations and requests addressed to "chapters people" that might be boring to most people on wikimedia-l but could have been publically archived with no problem.
The last "private" thing to happen on that list was discussion of the 2014 Affiliate Selected Board Seats process - actually not so much the process itself but how to deal with an intemperate email from someone from the English Wikipedia Signpost who was threatening to write an article about the process being an undemocratic sham. Apart from that we are stretching back into 2013 and the death throes of the WCA before anyone said anything interesting on the list.
On the subject of email lists, internal-l which is meant to be "chapters plus WMF staff" has had virtually no traffic for literally years. There was at one point a limit on the number of representatives of chapters that could be on internal-l (and IIRC on the chapters list) but that never really served any purpose (it certainly didn't improve the signal to noise ratio...)
What does all of this mean? I think it's pretty clear that broad-based private-access lists aren't serving any purpose. My preferred option would be to either ditch the Chapters mailing list or make it announce-only, scrap Internal-l entirely, and have an "affiliates" list that is open.
Chris