Consider Doing This?
Certainly the key to making a BND work in your city, country or group resides in your ability to get people together to discuss, prepare, execute and, most hopefully, later to put their heads together to consider what they have managed to do, failed to do, and might want to do better the next time around. In situations where people are spread out of a bit tight for time, physical meetings may not always be possible.
In almost all of our programs under The Commons, we set up what we call a @Forum to support the program or activity that we are trying to advance. You can see an example of that here in this site, if you click the @World BND Forum link on the menu to your left. Now as it happens and after about four years of experience with other techniques, for the last two years we have been using eGroups for these fora. Now eGroups is not perfect on a number of grounds, not least given the orientation of our BNDs and their use of advertising to support their service. Nonetheless, use it we do, and our justification for doing so is spelled out just below.
Here is how they have decided to go about this in the UK. We bring it to your attention here and leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. For our part, we think it's a terrific idea.
Like just about everything else in life, this particular communications and storage utility has at least one drawback in addition to its considerable advantages. Let's start with the good news, before we go on to consider the other stuff. First, (a) it's "free". But more important... (b) It's quite fast and easy to use. (c) It offers a handy archiving function which keeps all past correspondence at hand ad ready for you to access when you want. (d) It offers a built in search function that is handy when you want to have a look at all past items that treat a given topic or string. (e) It also permits immediate searches and listing by author, date and subject. (f) It offers a good currant icon and sign up routine (see below) that all those who are interested can add to their sites for their visitors to make use of. (g) It has a good anti-spam method of email address encryption for privacy protection, and more generally has anti-spam routines which in our experience do a pretty good job of protecting users from blatant violations.
That's the good news, now the kicker. It is financed by advertisements. For this reason we have initiated a poll on this topic to which we invite you to take a minute to respond. You will find it posted on the IBND List, under the Poll entitled "IBND and Advertiser Supported Services". You get to it by clicking the "Polls" button up at the top right of the Hotline home page. It opens with the following brief statement:
An Example: UK BND Discussion Group Advantages & Disadvantages of eGroups"We need your views on this. This discussion site is a good one, but it is supported by advertisement. I myself have not thought this through, but in any event it is a good subject for a group decision. How do we go?
Please select one or more of the following: "
That's all there is to it. Check which ever you think is best, and if you like write the group a note with your views on this. We look forward to the counsel of the group on this matter before making a final decision. (And yes! we do have some backups in sight.)
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Last updated 11 December 2000
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