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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"trebuchet ms",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Thanks to everyone who responded on and off-list. I've been monitoring the conversations and want to answer some of the questions that
have come up.</span>
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<div style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">I always organize my thoughts about an issue by asking a series of more and more focused questions, and the answer to the first question, "Do we want TownTalk to continue, in some form?" seems to be a strong
yes. While it's not a surprise, given that we are discussing it on the list itself, a large number of people have supported continuing it.</div>
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<div style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">The next question would be "How do we want to continue it?" This is a big question, and can be broken down into a few questions. One of them is the provider/host, and many people have made suggestions, with
(from my perspective) a consensus building around <a href="http://groups.io/" target="_blank">groups.io</a> That brings up the next question, however, which is "Who should run TownTalk?"</div>
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<div style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Groups.io only charges for enhanced features (including importing a list from other hosts), so after an initial setup fee control of the list could, in principle, be handed over from the Town. There are a
lot of restrictions on the Town, as a government, in operating a list that another organization would not be subject to. There may even be some legal hoops to jump through before handing it off, but the question of who should run it is a question that people
need to think about. I don't know how seamlessly we can transfer the list - I suspect that we can get everyone resubscribed quickly, but we might lose easy access to the archives (more than 20000 messages, which I downloaded to my computer last weekend).</div>
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<div style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Which provider to use is actually tied to the question of who runs the list. While <a href="http://groups.io/" target="_blank">groups.io</a> may have great features from the perspective of a subscriber, the
Town would have to verify that their terms of service were consistent with our legal obligations. Other choices, such as re-hosting the existing mailman software on another server (such as a cloud provider like Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services) are simpler,
as the Town would control the software and data more closely. (If we do that, there are still many choices about whether to stick with MailMan 2, which we are using now, upgrade to MailMan 3, or switch to other list management software such as Sympa or Dada
Mail.)</div>
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<div style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Because the deadline is very close (tomorrow!), it is my inclination to move the existing list to a new server (I should be able to get it up and running sometime this weekend), and after that continue the
discussion about moving to a new, presumably better service. Even if TownTalk will be moving to another provider, I believe I will need to move TownAnnounce in this way (Town Manager Lestitian is interested in moving that to an e-mail broadcasting service,
but again the time is too short to have that happen before the end of the week).</div>
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<div>Please continue the discussion, and let me know what you think!</div>
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<div>Alan</div>
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-- <br>
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<div>Alan K. Thompson, Mayor</div>
<div>Town of Riverdale Park</div>
<div>5008 Queensbury Road, Riverdale Park, MD 20737</div>
<div><a href="http://www.riverdaleparkmd.info" target="_blank">http://www.riverdaleparkmd.info</a></div>
<div><a href="mailto:akthompson@riverdaleparkmd.gov" target="_blank">akthompson@riverdaleparkmd.gov</a></div>
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