Why not just use email?

Email is simple and immediate and most of us already know how to use it. But there are a couple of problems....

• Inaccuracies in the mailing list: it is a challenge to maintain and dissemenate a mailing list. Ideally the mailing list would be updated directly by members whenever they changed their email address or their communication preferences.

• Fragmented conversations: in typical email conversations, an initial message will be addressed to the entire membership. However, frequently responses will be addressed to subsets of the membership or just to the original sender. In lengthy ongoing conversations, there are frequently many different subsets of recipients, each seeing their own unique portion of the entire conversation. Further, each individual in the conversation makes multiple "file or discard" decisions when managing their email inbox, so their is no archive record of the entire thread of conversation. Ideally it would be easy to address messages to the entire membership, and their would be a single, searchable archive of all messages address to the membership.