Mailing list consolidation
The OBF’s self-hosted mailman server is still struggling right now, so we are looking at migrating the active mailing lists to paid hosting, and as part of this consolidating down to ideally about a dozen mailing lists. Currently we have a lot of mailing lists, but many are dormant or redundant.
Some were announcement specific, where nowadays blogs and Twitter work quite well. Others were development specific (including automatic commit logs from central source code repositories), but now most OBF Project discussions are on GitHub. While the main project mailing lists used to have a lot of user support traffic, much of that has moved to external Q&A style sites like BioStars, StackExchange, or StackOverflow. What this means is that the OBF software projects probably only need a single mailing list each.
Based on http://mailman.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo here are the current publicly listed OBF hosted mailing lists.
Miscellaneous active public lists (propose to retain in some form):
- Bosc-announce – BOSC meeting announcements and updates (archive)
- GSoC – OBF mentors and students for Google Summer of Code (archive)
- Open-Bio-l – Open Bioinformatics Foundation cross-project dev discussion (archive)
Miscellaneous active but non-public lists (propose to retain in some form):
- bioinfo-core – Managers, Staff, and Scientists of Bioinformatics, Data Science and Research IT core facilities (private archive)
- Gsoc-mentors – GSoC – mentors only (private archive)
- Members – Communication channel to OBF members (private archive)
BioPerl (propose to merge to a single list):
- Bio-phylo-l – BioPerl Phylogenetics modules (archive)
- BioPerl-announce-l – Bioperl Project Announcements (archive)
- bioperl-dev – BioPerl Developer Core (archive)
- BioPerl-guts-l – BioPerl internals & bug reports (private archive)
- BioPerl-l – Bioperl Project Discussion List (archive)
- bioperl-microarray – Microarrays in BioPerl (archive)
BioJava (propose to merge to a single list):
- BioJava-dev – BioJava developers list (archive)
- BioJava-l – Biojava discussion list (archive)
Biopython (propose to merge to a single list):
- Biopython – Biopython discussion list (archive)
- Biopython-announce – Biopython announcements and news (archive)
- Biopython-dev – Biopython Developers List (archive)
BioRuby (propose to merge to a single list):
- BioRuby – BioRuby Project Discussion List (archive)
- BioRuby-cvs – BioRuby CVS commit notices (archive)
- BioRuby-ja – BioRuby Project Discussion List (in Japanese) (archive)
BioSQL (propose to merge to a single list):
- BioSQL-guts-l – Commit and Bugzilla messages for BioSQL (archive)
- BioSQL-l – BioSQL Discussion List (archive)
EMBOSS (propose to merge to a single list):
- EMBOSS – EMBOSS mailing list (archive)
- emboss-announce – EMBOSS Announcements (Releases, etc.) (archive)
- emboss-bug – EMBOSS Bug Reports and Support Requests (private archive)
- emboss-dev – EMBOSS Development Discussion (Open to all) (archive)
- emboss-submit – EMBOSS submissions – new packages and apps (private archive)
DAS (propose to merge to a single list, or close and archive):
- DAS – DAS discussion list (archive)
- DAS-announce – DAS announcement list (archive)
- DAS2 – DAS2 Discussion List (archive)
Dormant lists, including legacy projects (propose to close and archive):
- BioBiz – Commercial aspects of open source life science code (archive)
- Biocorba-announce-l – BioCorba Announcements (archive)
- biogroovy-l – biogroovy general discussion list (archive)
- BioLib-dev – BioLib Developers List (archive)
- Biosoap-l – BioSOAP project (archive)
- bp-announce – BioPathways Consortium Announcements (archive)
- Moby-announce – MOBY annoucements (archive)
- MOBY-dev – Core developer announcements (archive)
- MOBY-guts – MOBY CVS Commits Log (archive)
- moby-l – MOBY discussion list (archive)
- obf-developers – Open-Bio.org members with developer access (archive)
- Ontologies – Open Bio Ontologies list (private archive)
- Open-Bio-Announce – OBF announcements (archive)
- Open-Bioinformatics-Foundation – OBF broadcast list (archive)
- Volunteer – Open-Bio volunteer coordinator (private archive)
If this affects you directly (e.g. any project leaders we have not been able to contact yet), please write to the OBF board. Since mailman is currently unreliable, board at open-bio.org might not work. Please CC our fall back address of obf-board at Google Groups.
Update: Projects can also get in touch via this GitHub issue.