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Opinion
Global E-mail Lists and Reduction of Global Carbon Emissions
11/15/2006
- One campus had decided to have a management forum where people who wanted to post to the global group could share their intended postings in one spot and then after some kind of leadership consensus process, the notes agreed-upon would be collated into a single e-mail message with many parts and then sent out.
- At yet another campus, although the ability exists for users to abuse the faculty and staff lists if they wish to risk someone’s wrath, there is much greater protection for the student list – such that only a handful of people have the ability to send to that global list.
- One campus delegates the authority to approve “global e-mail messages” to the appropriate deans if to a smaller-than-really-global list, or to the appropriate vice president, depending upon the subject matter of the message.
- At another school, the IT staff aggregates students into a single list called a student hotline, which students can then unsubscribe from. A central repository collects all of the notices sent in by the variety of approved message sources (like the bookstore, athletic department, etc.) and then a single weekly e-mail g'es to the student global aggregate list.
- At yet another school, the IT staff maintains such a list and uses it for technical communications regarding IT services. The college relations office then decides what other kinds of communications should be shared to the aggregate list.
- One school has affinity groups that let potential senders sort and organize vast groups of recipients by various demographic information. Students can opt out of unofficial communications, and potential senders have to use up rationed “tokens” to send such messages. Additional tokens are very hard to get if you abuse them. The author of that message shared that a recent message sent to such a list was about “prostitutes,” which shocked people, until they realized that a spell checker had suggested that for a misspelling of “prosciutto.” Fun all around, eh?
In none of the cases that respondents have described thus far, d'es it appear that more than a couple of messages per week might be sent to the global list.
The fact that many do have some sort of mechanism for doing this, which might be penetrated by a weekly tip on reducing your carbon footprint has actually lifted the possibility – in my mind anyway – that the idea might work for ACUPCC. So I may have to write it up a bit more and make a real proposal.
What do you think? Is a weekly tip on reducing your carbon footprint/energy usage something that you think is okay for your institution to send out to the gobal e-mail list if your president agrees to sign on with ACUPCC?* I’d be interested in hearing from folks. Thanks.
* Note that this is not an official suggestion even, much less an accepted principle, of ACUPCC. Your president should consider the ACUPCC request, when it comes around, quite independently of this article.
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