On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Barak Moshe wrote: > May be, but would you consider that with only 5% of my time dedicated to > Listserv related tasks, and some 2000 expected list owners, many of whom will > change each year (they will be academic course assistants) my perspective could > be different ? Academic institutions are unique in this regard and I sometimes don't think the issues are fully appreciated or understood outside these institutions. People in charge of listserv in academic institutions are so far down the academic hierarchy, or not even under it (VP-Academic), where immediate management by design, can only express "We do this in 2 months" because decisions like "We can do this" have already been made; if you don't have a savy manager or if you deal ineffectively with your manager, you're stuck. The only choice I saw when I was in your situation, Moshe, was to create an owner support list for them, write a policy that said depts owned their lists and looked after them while I spent a week writing a web interface to avoid syntax & use training. I found it far easier to get a policy passed my manager (after it had been up a few months) then to get an additional body (that took almost 2 years). When I contacted Lsoft with these issues in 1996, it became clear that there were "listserv issues" (development is clearly a long term view) and "local issues" (I need a plan now). I do wish you all the best because I've been there. Please feel free to drop me a private note if you think it would help to bounce around some ideas or strategy. --Trish --------------- Trish Forrest, Queen's University