Systers

Web Page: http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/ideas2012

Mailing List: http://systers.org/mailman/listinfo/systers-dev

Systers is the largest (3400) world-wide electronic community of women in computing. A small group of members (and a few non-members, including men) maintain a specialized version of mailman, the systers “conversation model” that enables us to have varied discussions while keeping the signal -to -noise for an individual syster high. Systers maintains a custom version of GNU Mailiman that allows for dynamic sublists in addition to other features.

Projects

• Implementing wishlist items and bug-fixes for existing features Systers uses a heavily-customized version of GNU Mailman. A number of additional small features are desired to improve things further. My proposal aims at accomplishing items on their wishlist by adding new features and fixing various bugs encountered by modifying their existing features so as to improve their functionality.
• Making the Mailman essays more flexible Currently the essays are a single large box, I will work on letting administrators change this by allowing multiple boxes and different types of boxes: large boxes, small boxes, check boxes.
• Patches, Release and Testing Automation Currently, systers code is available as a branch form in repo. To use it, one needs to install mailman, and then checkout the systers code, and edit configuration files to make it working. The idea of the project is to move from brach form to patch form, which will make it easy for installation and testing across different platforms. Additionally, most of testing is done manually. This project involves working to automate everything from patch creation for new releases to testing to release management.