The need for a private discussion list came out of discussions between Wikimedia volunteers and members of the Wiki Education Foundation at WikiconferenceUSA 2015 in Washington DC. The list would be used to coordinate discussion about legislative and educational policy proposals and other matters of interest.

Hi @Fourandsixty, thanks for taking the time to report this!
Unfortunately this report lacks some information. If you have time, please add a more useful and complete description to this report.
Also see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Standardization#Wikimedia for naming conventions.

This is not a bug report, it is a request to create a new list: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists#Create_a_new_list

The naming convention would be the last one on the list "Other groups that would prefer to use lists to co-ordinate discussion can also use a top level name in a style that best matches their needs. e.g. cvn, cvn-private, huggle, mediawiki, mediawiki-api, openaccess, pywikibot etc." There are similar names here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview#Other_private_lists Is there some technical problem with this? Can you give a better description of what you are looking for?

I have added a link and a secondary list administrator's email address.

I can see where the elf@ alias is comming from, but perhaps something a bit more descriptive could be used?

Can you give an example of what you are talking about? Looking again at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview#Other_private_lists , the *inspire*, *hch-working-group*,and *wep* groups are all examples of invitation-only mailing lists with private archives, and concise descriptions. There are also groups with no description whatsoever. My current working description of the purpose of this group is "discussion of legislative, education, and policy proposals". I was looking for an acronym that was both easy to remember and easy to mention in passing conversation without having to spell it. I think you would agree that "elf" is more suitable than "dlepp" in this regard. The original purpose of the group was strictly legislative, but that could quickly become too limiting. Potentially, the mailing list could be used a platform to facilitate the exchange of ideas between members of the Wikimedia movement and the Wiki Education Foundation, and provide a forum to identify and discuss various trends and issues, and gain feedback in an informal environment. At this point, a more open-ended formal description would better enable the group to eventually define itself and refine its own mission.

I think the (expanded) name of "Education and Legislative Forum", with a goal "to coordinate discussion about legislative and educational policy proposals and other matters of interest," is sufficiently scoped, given other mailing lists that exist for more-or-less general purposes.

@Jalexander and @Dzahn: who handles mailing list creation these days? I remember when it was Thehelpfulone and John F. Lewis, but I think both of them are no longer doing it?

@MZMcBride unfortunately we have lost both volunteers. as far as i know nobody has the list creator password who doesn't also have the master password. a new volunteer would be good to have. until then the "ops on duty" person can handle it.

In T120523#1856665, @Fourandsixty wrote:

Other_private_lists , the *inspire*, *hch-working-group*,and *wep* groups are all examples of invitation-only mailing lists with private archives, and concise descriptions. There are also groups with no description whatsoever.

Yea, that's bad. We should not copy that but fix it if we can.

The information page says "After submitting the bug correctly, your list should be created within the next few days." What needs to be done next to make that happen?

added operations - until recently these were handled by volunteer(s) but for now ops is needed (unfortunately) because only ops has the list creator access now. I assume there is enough consensus about the naming now?

I have created the list.

I set the email addresses listed above as initial admins, set the list description to "Education and Legislative Forum",
and then reset the password and mailed elf-owner@lists.

You should find the password in your inbox now.

The list info page is here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/elf

You can find the admin login here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/admin/elf

Archives will be public here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/elf/
(unless you change that)

You are listed in the index on https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo

All other settings are default and unchanged. Please make sure that everything (especially settings related to public/private subscribing and archives) are as you want them before announcing the list widely.

I saw you said "private" so i set the archiving option to "private" and "subscribe_policy" to "require approval" assuming that's what you want.

Please see https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/admin/elf/?VARHELP=privacy/subscribing/subscribe_policy for what that means and which other options there are and check the other settings.

Please just leave the list "advertised" on the index page even if everything else is private.

Dzahn, thank you for doing this.

Thank you, Dzahn, much appreciated. And thank you to everyone who commented.