After a month, we noticed that we had around 800 community members with an interest in the use and advocacy of Free/Open Source Software in the region. There were numerous requests for help as well as offers of how to help. A mailing list community would allow the community to help each other out, where users from countries where the state of FOSS is relatively new or unknown, could get the help and assistance of others in the region and from around the world.

iosn-general

The iosn-general mailing list was created to facilitate this interchange, where general queries regarding FOSS would be answered by the community. What will be discussed and whether there will be a need for more specific lists will be decided and self moderated by the community.

Autosubscribing users

This was debated at length internally on whether we should do it to kickstart the community by doing something evil. On hindsight emailing users to subscribe would have been a better option. We apologize to users who have been inconvienced by this. We have been receiving a lot of unsubscribe requests, and Simos Xenitellis has written a short howto for unsubscribing or receiving digests. Most users that are having problems, are those with webmail accounts which do not interfaces to deal with large volumes of emails. For these users, we have already unsubscribed them.

Join the community and subscribe to the mailing list

For those interested in joining the mailing list, visit the online subscription form