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The driving force behind the Berkeley Parents Network is an intense desire to make information available to people. We try to help parents be better parents and better people, by giving them an easy way to take advantage of, and contribute to, the great pool of knowledge we posses when we all put our heads together. That is the vision for the Berkeley Parents Network.
Technical details:
The rest of this page goes into details about how it works, how it started, and how you can create a similar list.
About me
It's probably relevant to give you some background about
who I am.
I have an MS in Computer Science (1994) from UC Berkeley.
I started BPN back in 1993
when I was a middle-aged grad student in engineering with two school-aged kids.
I am now a computer programmer for and technical manager of the
Berkeley Digital Library Project,
which is a five-year-old research project funded by the National Science
Foundation.
My area is web-based databases, and I write
programs that let you search and browse large collections of
text, images, maps, etc. over the web.
I love my job, I get to
work with smart people doing interesting things, and I have a flexible
work environment that allows me to do work at home at 6am on Sunday morning
when I have a good idea, or after dinner when it's quiet, or on Tuesday
afternoon when I'm waiting for the plumber to show up. I am a person
who spends every spare minute on the computer, and when I'm not doing it
for pay, I'm doing it for fun.
I started BPN because it was fun to start it, and it's still going because
it is still fun to do it.
It is not a part of my job with the Digital Library Project,
and I am not paid by the University to do BPN.
It is an "extracurricular" activity of mine and the other volunteers
who put it together.
But many of the tools that I use for my job, I also use for
BPN, and vice versa. So, some amount of technical expertise has
gone into BPN, and is still necessary to keep it going the way it is now.
About the volunteer moderators
After a few years of doing the mailing list myself, and watching the
membership grow exponentially, it soon became obvious that I needed help!
There are now seven volunteer parents who create the different
newsletters by receiving email messages from subscribers and compiling them into
digests. All of us together have developed the policies that we use for
the newsletter and each moderator runs her own newsletter more or less
autonomously. (I use "her" because up to this point, we moderators have all been moms.)
The different parts of the newsletter, and the
people who moderate each one, are on the FAQ at
http://parents.berkeley.edu/FAQ/newletters.html.
In addition to the BPN digests, there is
a separate list for Parents of Teens and for Families in Academia.
Some of the moderators receive as many as 100 emails a day, so it's essential that a moderator be able to read email several times a day, every day. Some of our current moderators have jobs that require them to be at the computer most of the day. Some are very organized stay-at-home moms. All of us have young children.
Moderators need to be proficient at organizing large amounts of information, creating files, formatting and mailing the final digest. And they need to be familiar with the newsletter policies, be able to make judgements about questionable submissions. It helps if they are tactful too, and can handle correspondence with subscribers in a way that does not inspire reams of angry replies.
We have been very lucky to have a great group of volunteers who manage to do all these things, and keep doing them day after day. Every year or so, someone needs to go off and do other things, but we have always been able to find a new volunteer who could take on the demands of the moderator role. This is mostly because it's fun doing it - you get to know so many different kinds of moms and dads in our community, and see first-hand the wealth of information and the sincerity of the spirit of giving. But it does require work: moderators spend anywhere from 1 hour a day to several hours a day reading and replying to email and assembling the newsletter!
The mechanics of mailing the newsletters
The subscriber lists for BPN and Parents of Teens are two plain
text files of email addresses that reside on parents.berkeley.edu. I do
not keep names of subscribers or any other information about them, just
their email addresses. Additions,
deletions, and address changes are done via a web form, and some automated
checking
goes on (addresses are looked up for unsubscribes and address changes for example.)
But these are otherwise done by hand (by me) so that we have control
over the subscriber base. The only reason for doing this is that we get
requests to join from all over the world, and our volunteers just cannot
support the world of parents, so we limit membership to Bay Area parents
and we ask for a city on the subscription form.
Currently we get about 20 new subscribers a day
for BPN and Parents of Teens. The subscriber lists are kept in a private
partition so that they are not accessible by anyone but me.
We used to have subscribers email their messages to separate addresses for each newsletter, which would be received by that newsletter's moderator. However in 2002 we started a new system of posting messages using a webform. See http://parents.berkeley.edu/post.html. The webforms use Perl cgi scripts that I wrote to format the subscriber's message and mail it to the right moderator.
This new system helps the volunteers manage correspondence in many ways -- all postings can be checked against the subscriber list to make sure they are coming from a member (previously we had problems with non-subscribers looking for housing or wanting to sell household items in our newsletters). We can also make sure that required info is present on the posting, such as contact info on a childcare share, and regulate the length of messages automatically. Previously we had to return messages like this, creating extra work for the moderators. We can also regulate things that were previously very timeconsuming, such as the line length of the messages. Subscribers tell us they like the forms because the current topics (for Advice and Recommendations) are listed on the form, and it's easier to figure out which newsletter a posting should be sent to.
Each moderator receives incoming BPN mail from the webforms just as if it had been sent directly to her own email address. Most moderators have mail filters set up so that incoming BPN mail goes to a separate mail folder to be read as time permits. When the moderator is ready to send out a digest, usually every few days, she uses copy-and-paste to copy each email message into a digest template, grouped by topic. (Templates for the various newsletters are online at http://parents.berkeley.edu/utils/) Some moderators use NotePad or WordPad on their PC to create a .txt file, some use emacs on their UNIX machine, some use Word and convert the result to plain text.
When the moderator is ready to send out a digest, she emails it to me, either copy-and-pasting the entire newsletter into an email, or attaching it as a plain text file to an email. Our longer digests (Advice and Recommendations) tend to be around 1200-2400 lines of text. The shorter ones might be 800 lines or so. We try to send out each digest at least once a week, but not as often as every day, since more frequent newsletters seem to generate more email! I mail it out using the Unix sendmail program directly, so that I can make sure the "To" and "From" info in the heading reads the way we want. This allows me to receive all the undeliverable mail, vacation messages, etc. I get around 10 or 20 of these everytime I mail out a newsletter.
Policies for Parents' Mailing Lists
BPN has developed policies over the years in response to problems as
they have come up. Most likely you will want your own policies depending
on your situation, and most likely those policies will change as your list
grows and changes. When you are just startingout, I recommend that you not
spend too much time thinking about policies. Start out with a few basic
rules about what's allowed and what isn't, and then be ready to change them
or add to them as the need arises.
Look at the FAQ for BPN policies about everything from politeness to politics. We think that we have been successful because of these policies and other decisions we've made, such as:
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