Hello Samuel, I'm glad I got the right list. According to your definition, the project fits Wikimedia's goal. I will now introduce it. The project is called Librelist. The official website introduces it quite well, so I'll just quote it: ####################################### Librelist is a free as in freedom mailing list site for open source projects. It is a place for FOSS communities to discuss all the things they want without ads, censorship, signup requirements, bundled apps, or requirements that you use any particular email client or service. Anyone Can Make A List You can make a mailing list by simply sending an email to list(a)librelist.com, and if it doesn’t exist, it will make it for you and subscribe you. That’s all there is to it, and no restrictions on making the lists. Anyone Can Subscribe To A List You also subscribe to a list by simply sending your first message to list(a)librelist.com. That’s it. It ditches your original message and sends you a confirmation you reply to. No signup or web forms involved. Spam And Bounce Blocking Spam is heavily blocked on all lists to keep things clean. We will also periodically ban anonymous email services if they become a vector for abuse. Bounced emails are caught and anyone who bounces has all of their subscriptions paused until they can fix the problem and reinstate themselves. ############ End quote Website address: http://librelist.org I would like to add that Librelist is a much need alternative to existing mailing list solutions. Let's say that a group of people, as you said, are trying to collaborate over free knowledge. These people usually need a mailing list. What options do they have? There are two sets of options: (1) commercial solutions and (2) self-hosted open-source solution. Commercial mailing list providers, such as Google and Yahoo, have a lot of resources in their disposal that could in principle be used for providing a great mailing list service. But that's not what happens in practice. To paraphrase a comment from Librelist's founder Zed Shaw, Google and Yahoo optimize their services to give the best experience for the user; Problem is, from their perspective, the "user" is not the person trying to communicate on the mailing list, but the advertiser paying Google/Yahoo for advertising on the mailing list. Needless to say, this does not result in a very good experience for the actual user. I know personally some people who manage a mailing list hosted by Google, and I was told there are many problems with it, specifically an abundance of spam and lack of good tools for dealing with it. The second approach is to use mailing list software such as mailman or piper. This has two problems: (1) It requires a server for hosting the list, and a system administrator to configure and maintain the mailing list. For some project this is a big barrier, for others it's merely a waste of time and resources. (2) The popular mailing list programs are not very good. Take mailman for example, which is used for this mailing list. It does many things which may have been considered acceptable 10 years ago, but not today. The subscription process is cumbersome, the program sends the user his password in plain text, and generally its interface looks like a 1995 website. So there aren't very good options for a group that needs a mailing list. I would like to note that I have been in this exact situation recently, as I needed to make mailing lists for my open source projects. I just couldn't find a good solution. This is how I found Librelist. I believe that Librelist is a good solution, and I think of it as the Wikipedia of mailing lists. Every user can start a new mailing list, and post on any mailing list he wishes. And I would say, that the biggest disadvantage Librelist currently has is this: Since it is a relatively new community project, it's hard to trust that it will stay operating and well-maintained for years. People don't want to start a mailing list on a service that might get closed 6 months from now. The founder of Librelist seems enthusiastic enough, but this is a non-profit project for him, so it's impossible to be certain that he will not become too busy for the project in the future. I think that the Wikimedia foundation should sponsor this project. I think it wouldn't require a big amount of resources, but it will require the persistence and reliability over time that Wikimedia has shown with Wikipedia and its other projects. This will solve the concern I mentioned above, and will make Librelist a very attractive choice for people who want to collaborate. I'd be happy to hear any comments. Best Wishes, Ram Rachum. On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Sincerely, Ram Rachum

Ram, thanks for sharing your interesting project. On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:15 PM, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote: Limited to FOSS communities? +1 Platonides is right, it's not clearly part of our current mission - though it does facilitate some types of collaboration, mail threads are parallel to our notion of talk pages. There's certainly something to be gained from thinking about what our mailing lists provide that LiquidThreads* does not, and identifying/supporting efforts to improve that channel for conversations. (*This is our current concept of threaded discussion in the context of directly collaborating on some sort of lasting knowledge) But just as we don't support multiple wiki platforms or mailman itself, we aren't generally a project host. Have you talked to the FSF about hosting such a service, considering your FOSS focus? SJ

On Apr 29, 2010, at 9:08 PM, Chad wrote: Unashamed plug: there's a task force on the strategy wiki to discuss exactly these issues: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Content_scope Participation is welcomed. Philippe ____________________ Philippe Beaudette Facilitator, Strategy Project and Head of Reader Relations Wikimedia Foundation philippe(a)wikimedia.org Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

Chad wrote: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects Creating a new language for an existing project is easier: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages Before getting its own wiki, the proposal will probably go by the incubator first.