Date: October 28, 1997
From: Charles Hedrick, Technical Director, OIT
To: George Laskaris, Executive Director, OIT
Subject: Working Paper from the Email Taskforce
 

I am happy to enclose a working paper from the Email Taskforce. As you will see, this proposes a fairly ambitious plan to use email for University communications.

Implementing these proposals will require participation by people throughout the University. Thus I believe you will want to start by having a few key people look at the recommendations. They can help us decide how to involve their staff.

The following is text you might want to consider for use in your covering letter:
 
 

I am pleased to enclose a working paper produced by the Email Taskforce. This body met over the summer, to look at appropriate ways to use Email for University business. This paper contains a number of promising ideas. However before going ahead with them, I believe we need a broader discussion throughout the University. I would appreciate it if you would read the paper yourself, and ask some of your key staff to read it. I believe we should then schedule one or more meetings with you, and whatever staff you believe are appropriate, to review the issues raised here and look at implementation.

I would expect you and your staff to have questions and comments on many aspects of this report. However there are some specific issues on which your input is particularly important:

• Are the initial sets of lists suggested in Appendix 1 the right place to start?
• Do you agree with the moderation approach suggested here? If we take this approach, staff who report to you will be involved in administration of the mailing lists. At some point in the implementation process we would need to agree on the actual list of moderators.
• Do you have any problems with your data custodians using the SRDB and Personnel databases to build mailing lists of these kinds? We would like permission to use the complete databases, and not accept requests for omission from the lists. We will allow access to the lists for official communications only, and we will not make the contents of the lists publicly available.

Administrative Use of Email Lists

This is a working paper of the Rutgers University Email Taskforce. This taskforce is a University-wide group charged with advising OIT on email strategy. The membership is listed in Appendix 3. The Taskforce spent the late spring and summer of 1997 reviewing various issues, ranging from available technologies to likely uses of email. It will continue to meet periodically, and to consult via email. Rather than issuing a single report that covers all possible issues, the Taskforce has chosen to issue working papers on specific issues on which University-wide discussion seems to be required.

This is the first such working paper, covering the implications of large-scale administrative use of email. The focus of this paper will be on the use of mailing lists, since that is going to require the most involvement by the rest of the University.

Goals

This paper assumes that the University is going to start using email in much the same way that paper mail is currently being used. Email has advantages over the current paper processes in cost, in timeliness, and in the ability to embed references to web pages and other online resources. Currently a number of areas are already starting to use email in this way. Examples include Cook College and Camden for student communications, and the Teaching Excellence Center for communications with departments.

This paper focuses on the administrative and policy issues involving with setting up and maintaining these mailing lists. There are also significant technical issues. However the audience for them appears to be somewhat different. Thus they are being addressed separately.

Summary

The goal is to allow email to groups of people. Generally these groups are defined by characteristics present in our administrative data, e.g. all graduating seniors, all majors in a certain department, or all department chairs. The major issues are

• Defining the mailing lists. Eventually we will probably want the ability to run ad hoc queries to define groups. However the taskforce suggests that we start by predefining certain lists that are likely to be the most useful. We need to arrange a process for extracting the necessary information from our administrative databases, and using it to create mailing lists that can be used straightforwardly.
• Controlling access. We almost certainly do not want these lists to be available to everyone with access to the Internet. This would result in inappropriate use, as well as excessive mail volume. Thus mechanisms for control are needed. We propose a scheme based on assigning one or more moderators for each list.
• Implementation. In addition to the obvious technical issues, the taskforce is particularly concerned about making sure that staff throughout the University get the proper training to make use of the facilities discussed here.

The rest of this paper will contain recommendations in these areas.

Defining the Mailing Lists

There are three major ways to create mailing lists:

• User-maintain lists
• Ad hoc queries
• Pre-defined lists

Currently the only way Rutgers users can send email is by directing it to a specific user, or by using a list that is maintained by some individual. OIT maintains an online email directory (the "white pages") for people who want to send mail to specific individuals. There are currently some problems with this directory, which are being addressed. However that is beyond the scope of this paper.

Various departments (including OIT) also maintain mailing list facilities. These allow users to create lists of email addresses. One may send mail to the entire list as easily as to an individual. Such lists are appropriate for relatively small groups of people, and for groups whose membership does not change a lot. The disadvantage is that someone needs to maintain the list, adding and removing addresses as necessary. This is probably impractical for larger lists such as all graduating seniors, or all faculty.

The most flexible way to send email would be by using ad hoc queries. That is, it would be possible to send a message to a group of people defined by any combination of attributes stored in our administrative data. For example, one could send mail to all graduating seniors in the computer science department with a GPA greater than 3.0. In the long run, we will certainly want a system like this. However implementing it is a fairly complex project.

A reasonable compromise is to maintain a set of predefined mailing lists. These would be groups that we believe would be commonly used, and that cover a significant portion of the institution's requirements. These lists would be based on periodic extracts from administrative data. For example, they might be updated once a week by an automated procedure.

The taskforce believes that Rutgers should plan to support all of the types of list described above. However we suggest that the University begin getting experience with large-scale mailing by

• Supporting a high-quality system for lists maintained by users and departments. This requirement should be met by the LISTSERV system that OIT has recently made available, as well as by various systems currently run by departments themselves.
• Implementing a set of predefined lists that cover a reasonable range of requirements for both students and departmental staff. These lists would be kept up to date regularly by an automated process, based on data from administrative databases.

Appendix 1 contains a suggested starting point for the lists. However this list should be reviewed more widely before implementation.

Controlling Access

Mailing lists are normally quite easy to use: you simply send email to a specified address. For example, there is a mailing list for the OIT directors. To send to them, you direct email to csdirs-list@ns2, as if it were a normal individual's email address. If we implement the previous proposal, it is likely to be just as easy to send email to all faculty or all students.

There are several reasons to be concerned about this:

• Many companies are now using email for advertisements. They have no limitations on who they will send to, and it is often nearly impossible to be removed from their list. We would not want such a company to start sending mail to one of our large mailing lists.
• Even within the University, there are policy reasons that we probably do not want just anyone to be able to send to large numbers of faculty or staff. We can all imagine groups for which this would be considered inappropriate.
• Even if the use is appropriate, there are dangers to excessive use of these lists. It is easier to ignore and delete an email message than paper mail: with most mail readers you just need to hit one key or make one mouse click. If members of the community start seeing mail sent to these lists as "junk mail", they will stop reading it.

The primary control on paper mail is cost: there is a substantial cost to getting mailing labels, as well as duplicating and sending the mail. While the taskforce discussed charging for large-scale email, we don't believe the community will react well to fees that aren't associated with some identifiable cost. Thus we do not currently recommend charging per message.

The most straightforward alternative appears to be use of moderated mailing lists. With a moderated list, each list has an owner and one or more moderators. Anyone can send a message to the list. However each message must be approved by one of the moderators before it will be distributed. Where there are certain people who would commonly send to the list, it is possible to set things up so that messages from them go through without review by the moderator.

The primary problem with moderation is choosing and training the moderators, and setting policies for acceptance. The taskforce suggests that moderators be chosen according to normal concepts of administrative responsibility. That is, lists of students would be moderated by staff in the office of the department, Dean, or VP for Student Affairs (depending upon the scope of the list). Lists of faculty or staff would be moderated by staff in the appropriate offices.

OIT experience with policy issues suggests that it will be nearly impossible to guess in advance all of the questions that will come up about appropriate use. Thus the taskforce suggests that we start with a small number of lists, choose moderators who are at an appropriate level to exercise judgement, and provide only the most basic of guidance. Obvious policies would be

• Email must be "official business".
• The volume should be limited. In order to avoid the "junk mail" effect, we suggest an initial target of one or two per week at levels such as the department and dean, and every few weeks for more global lists.
• Email about events should be consolidated. E.g. rather than sending separate mail for each pizza party, a college might issue "events of the week". Even better, maintain a web page, and periodically remind students to look at it.
• The subject line of the message must indicate its content. This will allow readers to more easily decide which messages they are interested in, and thus somewhat reduce complaints about getting too many messages. We suggest a convention indicating the group to which it is sent, a possible tag indicating an official notice, and the content. Without such a convention the tendency is for subject lines to be something like "Important message!". Instead we would like to see something like "Cook seniors: OFFICIAL NOTICE: what you need to do to make sure you will graduate"

The taskforce will work with OIT to provide the necessary training. Most likely, a few members of the taskforce will join with technical staff in meeting with the moderators. During the early stages, there should be meetings of the moderators once or twice a year to review how things are going, and identify issues that need to be dealt with.

Implementation

Implementation of the actual mailing list mechanism is primarily a OIT responsibility. Based on current OIT staffing and priorities, it appears that the initial set of lists are likely to be available in late Spring, 1998. The priority during the Fall is implement the online ADR system. This is necessary in order to get accurate email addresses for faculty and staff. It is not possible to construct email lists until we have email addresses for the members of the lists.

OIT plans to have more detailed implementation proposals for review by the taskforce by late 1997 or early 1998.

An Initial Set of Email Lists

The taskforce suggests that we start with a relatively small number of lists, chosen to handle some of the most common requirements. This will allow us to get experience with list maintenance and moderation. That experience is likely to affect the way in which we approach a more full-scale implementation.

The University has three major groups: students, faculty, and staff. There are different communications needs associated with each. Thus we suggest starting with a limited set of lists for each group.

Students

There are several reasonable approaches to creating lists of students, for example

• By class year, probably within college. That is, we would have a list for first year students in Cook, etc.
• By major
• By course

The committee feels that the most useful starting points are likely to be the first and third, i.e. by class year and college, and by course.

Class year and college are easily available from the Registrar's data. These lists would be most conveniently maintained centrally, with updates roughly once a week, based on downloads of data from the Registrar. Aggregated lists would also be available that include all students in a college and all students in a given year across colleges.

For course purposes, we suggest that it is probably best to allow faculty to maintain their own mailing lists. However course rosters should be available in an online form that can be fed directly into mailing list software. This would make it easy to create mailing lists. Faculty would likely find such rosters useful for other purposes as well.

Faculty and Staff

In the long run, we believe there should be a hierarchical set of lists, organized along reporting relationships. These could be constructed using the reporting relationship codes currently in the payroll database. Thus we would have lists of faculty by department, by college, and by campus. Staff would have equivalent organization.

However this would be a rather large structure to put in place immediately. Thus the taskforce suggests that we start by creating the electronic equivalent of the existing A through G mailing lists. Use of these lists is fairly well understood, and the data defining them is easily available from the payroll database. This would allow us to begin getting experience with a moderate number of lists. The A through G mailing lists are included as Appendix 2.

In addition to these general lists, OIT is currently in the process of constructing a list of department chairs by college, with aggregate lists for each campus and the entire University. These lists will be moderated by OIT staff until there is sufficient experience for moderation to be taken over by staff in the Deans' offices.

Existing Administrative Mailing Lists

After the list names, we include the number of members of the list, University-wide, as of October 28, 1997.

Members of the Email Taskforce

 
Robert Boikess, Chemistry Dept, New Brunswick
Andrew Campbell, Assistant Coordinator, Residence Life, Cook College
Joan Carbone, Associate Dean of Students, Rutgers College
Louie Crew, English Dept, Newark
Monica Devanas, Associate Director, New Brunswick Teaching Excellence Center
Gary Gigliotti, Director, New Brunswick Teaching Excellence Center
Bernice Ginder, Director, Administrative Computing Services (acting)
Peter Graham, University Libraries
Charles Hedrick, Director, New Brunswick Computing Services
Kenneth Iuso, University Registrar
Daren Jacobs, Manager, Computing Services, University Relations
James Marino, Director, Career Development, Camden
David Petroski, Library and Information Studies, New Brunswick
Jesse Rambo, Director, University Mail Serivces
Sandra Russell, HR/Financial Systems Coordinator
Elsa Vineberg, Associate Dean for Instruction, Rutgers College
Matthew Weismantel, Director, Campus Information Services