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4th ESF technicalities
In this page I'll try to briefly present the technical solutions that were developed in the areas where I was involved during the process of organizing the 4th European Social Forum. The goal is to use this experience in order to extract some insight and technological suggestions that might be useful to future social forums
My main field of involvement was the event website, which intersected with some other key issues, such as the registration process, the program of activities and the communication with volunteers. But I should probably start from the very beggining.
Mailing lists
The first communication tool that was deployed for the 4th ESF was a mailing list server. I installed the Mailman (free) software on my GNU/Linux dedicated server in order to support lists on the athens.fse-esf.org domain.
Some points worth mentioning. Both positive and negative.
- For each topic that was of both local and international interest, two lists where created. For example logistics@athens.fse-esf.org and logistics-gr@athens.fse-esf.org. The lists with the -gr suffic served messages of local interest written in Greek, but the Greek list itself was also subscribed to the respective international list. This way the local users only had to subscribe to the -gr list and send their messages to the greek or international list, depending on their language. This scheme worked pretty well
- Mailman proved to be a stable, reliable and relatively easy to use tool. Unfortunately we lost the chance of translating the mailman interface to Greek with the help of Babels and contributing the translation to the free software project
- Another issue we didn't work was educating the list admins, some of whom did not have prior experience to the use of such tools and also lacked some basic e-manners. That led to a severe server crisis after a company providing some DNS services to my server, recieved spam complaints by people that found themselves subscribed to 4th ESF lists against their will. To make a long story short, there was some downtime for all the websites my server hosts, a lot of panic and since then some webmail services like hotmail mark as junk all email messages originating from my server :-(
- Moreover there was some real spam distributed through some 4th ESF mailing lists after the 20th of May. Most listadmins didn't respond to the issue and I had to turn on emergency moderation for all messages on all lists. If the listadmins ignore the approval requests from now on the lists will be unusable from now on.
