Short description
I would like to see tight integration of wiki with email, in the particular sense of being able to create a very simple ad-hoc mailing list based on MyGroup.
Suppose I have just had a meeting with BillSmith and JaneEvans, plus 3 guys from marketing. We would like to put some ideas together into a proposal, and we'd like to keep our boss ScaryMcPherson in the loop.
One solution to this would be to do use the wiki in discussion mode: I create a framework page, then invite the others to contribute and Scary to listen in. I probably do this via email, which means I'm already having to put together an impromptu mailing list. Everyone then (hopefully) subscribes themselves to the wiki page to receive updates, and then we all go away and work on the page.
I would like to propose having a facility (either integrated into the wiki or as some kind of add-on) which integrates this. Before our meeting, I can create a group called MyGroup with contents {{{ * BillSmith
and then send the following email: {{{From: me@example.com To: mailinglist@wiki.example.com Subject: MyGroup - Meeting on Thursday about proposal
Don't forget the meeting on Thursday at which we're going to plan our Summer campaign.
R.}}}
This email then gets sent to all the members of MyGroup. Once the meeting is done, I can send an email to the list to remind people what they're supposed to do. And then we can dissolve the list by deleting MyGroup once the proposal is done. I don't anticipate having to incorporate all the features of Mailman, since this is very much intended to be a temporary list. In particular, archiving of messages will not be required - although perhaps a log might be useful, perhaps auto-appended to the MyGroup page.
A nice feature is that users can be added and removed by existing MyGroup members or even dictated by one person in the group (if you've set the page ACL right).
I obviously don't care about the specifics (does the email go to mailinglist@wiki.example.com with a subject line identifying MyGroup, or should email be sent to MyGroup-list@wiki.example.com?), and I'm hoping this might be implementable in the existing wiki framework.
Other Information:
- I believe this is a fairly common groupware feature, in something like Lotus Notes/Domino.
- Is it at all similar to the "Talk" feature on Wikipedia?
- This is partly a reaction against the number of times I've seen a comment on a mailing list like "It's not worth the effort setting up a mailing list for that project, because it's so small." So instead we have (a) irrelevant discussions on central mailing lists (like projects where the users and developers share a mailing list) or (b) one central person managing the email list manually or (c) reply-all emails with 250 people in the To: line.
I think it starts to cross the boundary of WikiNature, but in a good way. There are conversations we have, particularly when working closely with people, that are not worthy of being stored in a version history; the Group Mailing Lists idea can capture those shifting groups of people who need to work together and the communication which flows between them.
OK, that's enough Ecstacy-inspired motivation.
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