We're closing the old mailing lists

Dear OpenSpending community member,

We have some news! We are migrating from the old mailing lists (openspending@lists.okfn.org, openspending-dev@lists.okfn.org) to the OpenSpending category on the Open Knowledge Forums: OpenSpending - Open Knowledge Forums.

The current mailing lists are not as active as they used to be, and the Forum (powered by the popular open source forum software Discourse) is now the best place for community conversation around Open Knowledge projects, including OpenSpending.

We aim to close the mailing lists by the end of 2016.

Once you have signed up, in order to receive updates from the OpenSpending forum, go to OpenSpending - Open Knowledge Forums, click the dropdown menu on the top-right side and select the desired option:

See more on how to use the forum here: How to use this forum

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Hurrah :smile: :thumbsup: :clap: :unicorn:

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I wonder if anyone knows what happened to the old OpenSpending mailing list archives (openspending, openspending-dev, etc)? Were backups made (and if so, where might these be found)? I’m hoping that they have been renamed and taken off the public listings, but that they still might be available on mailman or on a backup server somewhere.

cc @VictoriaVlad @adam @Diana @pwalsh @vitorbaptista

Many thanks!

@jwyg I’m not sure if there’s some backup of the mailing list, but you can check them via archive.org at https://web.archive.org/web/20160910151045/https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openspending/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20120924035613/http://lists.okfn.org:80/pipermail/openspending-dev/. The list of mailing lists is available on https://web.archive.org/web/20160526174838/https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo.

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Thanks Vitor! Indeed, I checked this but the Wayback Machine doesn’t seem to have archived all messages. It is a shame as if there is no backup then this means there is no persistent record (e.g. for research or for linking back to previous messages).

Do you know who might have requested / undertaken deletion, and whether they may have done an export before deletion? Perhaps in future if mailing lists are fully deleted then we may consider exporting and uploading a copy of the archive somewhere (e.g. as a file on the Internet Archive).

Hi @jwyg and @vitorbaptista

There is an export, and it should still be web accessible. I am travelling now but I will get the details next week.

@pwalsh it would be good to know where to find this.

Also i can’t find the old okfn-discuss mailing list: lists.okfn.org Mailing Lists

This was a crucial mailing list :slight_smile:

I assume when we shut down mailing list we shut down with the “preserve” archive option right … (and permanently back up the archive somewhere safe and preferably web accessible …)