(ISF) Are your posts being ignored or deleted by other members of the group?

Dear ISF Colleagues,

Here are a few tips for making your contributions to the Information
Systems Forum more readable:

- Identify yourself. Readers pay more attention to a message when
there's a name and organizational affiliation attached to it.

- Avoid using all capital letters. In email, this is equivalent to
shouting, and considered an insult to one's readers.

- Use only plain text. This list doesn't support graphics, HTML, or
attached documents.

- Separate each paragraph with a blank line.

- Clean up jagged margins. Readers tend to get so discouraged by them
that they skip your message and go on to the next one.

- Trim, trim, trim! Unnecessary repetitions of previous posts, list
footers, and signature lines are tedious for other members to
negotiate. If you're replying to a previous message, please trim away
everything but the essentials of that message and your response to it.
If you don't trim your post down, and I think that it would benefit
from trimming, then I edit it myself. This means extra work for me,
and a trim job for your message that you as the author may deem unduly
harsh.

- Double-check your subject line, and make sure that it summarizes the
topic. If you subscribe to the digest format of the list, then the
subject line will automatically be something like "Digest Number 123."
Please change it to something more topical. It's also helpful to trim
away clutter from previous generations of forwarding; "FW: Tech
Funding for Nonprofits" is much more readable than "Fwd: FW: Re: FW:
[ICT] RE: Tech Funding for Nonprofits."

- Write for a worldwide readership. If you say that an event is
happening tonight at "the Firehouse in J.P.,"; the Bostonians will know
that you mean "the Firehouse Multicultural Art Center in Jamaica
Plain,"; but the folks in Singapore probably won't. And if they need
to fly in from Singapore to attend, it's probably a good idea to give
them more than a few hours' notice.

- Write about subjects that pertain to how nonprofit organizations can
use information and communication technologies to increase
organizational effectiveness. Readers subscribe to the list because
they are interested in this specific topic. If you stray too far from
it, your message will probably be ignored.

- Frame your message in the language of civil discourse, and avoid
inflammatory rhetoric. Posts that are simply attacks on someone
else's religion, operating system, ethics, ancestry, or attitude are
unacceptable in this email distribution list. The rule of thumb is to
assume that others are motivated by the best intentions, even when you
think that they are gravely mistaken.

Thanks for your attention to these tips. I'm sure that you will find
that following these suggestions is in your best interests.

Many thanks and best regards from Deborah

Deborah Elizabeth Finn
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
deborah_elizabeth_finn%40post.harvard.edu">deborah_elizabeth_finnpost.harvard.edu
www.cyber-yenta.org

Recommended reading:
"Universal Declaration of Human Rights"
<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights>;

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