INFORMS Online
Subdivisions, URLs & Mail
By Matthew Saltzman
Subdivisions are an important part of what INFORMS is and does, and IOL is committed to supporting subdivisions' online activities. Beginning last fall, several steps have been taken to help subdivisions do their important work.
Universal URLs
By now, all of INFORMS' subdivisions have a Web presence of some sort. Since many of these pages were created by volunteers or officers in the subdivisions, they were hosted at the creators' servers — often within their personal space. Eventually, it became apparent that this arrangement had some problems. For one thing, INFORMS' name did not appear in many of the URLs. In addition, when responsibility for maintenance changed hands, the pages would often be moved to the new editor's server and the URL would change, outdating links on IOL and other publicity materials. A similar problem arose regarding journal home pages.
In the early days of IOL, there was not much that could be done about this problem. When the IOL server was hosted at the University of Michigan, the university provided IOL's domain name service (DNS, the system that maps server names like www.informs.org to their numeric addresses), and our ability to request changes was limited. We could have provided automatic redirection for pages under www.informs.org, but that seemed less than ideal. The solution we wanted was to provide subdivisions and journals with their own server names.
Now that the IOL server is housed in the INFORMS business office. INFORMS has full control of our DNS profile, so we have the ability to create server aliases whenever they are needed. DNS entries have been created for all subdivision and journal pages. These URLs point to the IOL Web server, which redirects requests to the servers that actually host the pages. This configuration solves both of the above problems. The URL associated with a subdivision is part of the informs.org domain (e.g., computing.society.informs.org). It is also permanent — no matter where the pages reside, users enter the same URL to reach them. Moving a site to another server involves a simple reconfiguration of the IOL server.
Standardized e-mail addresses will be created for subdivision contacts. INFORMS officers, directors and journal editors already have such addresses (e.g., president@mail.informs.org). As personnel change, these aliases can be updated in one place.
Hosting Services
For subdivision page editors for whom hosting is problematic, IOL can provide space on our server for subdivision Web sites. Editors can create pages on their own machines, then upload them to an area on the IOL server. We provide space, bandwidth, backups and, eventually, other services such as indexing and site search may be supported. Of course, the same goes for journal Web pages.
Mailing Lists
Several subdivisions have mailing lists for their members. In addition to the Web site issues discussed above, subdivision mailing list managers face the challenge of keeping their subscriber and membership lists coordinated. A particular problem is making sure that members who do not want to receive subdivision e-mail are kept off the subscriber list when it is synchronized with the membership list.
Hosting subdivision mailing lists at IOL allows us to address many of the problems that list administrators face. The list is INFORMS-branded (its address is in the informs.org domain). The address is permanent and does not change as list administrators pass the responsibility on. The software stays the same, so subscribers don't have to keep learning to interact with different interfaces.
IOL now runs a list server, which is available for subdivision mailing lists. It uses Mailman (the GNU mailing list manager) — a flexible, easy-to-administer system. Administration is mainly Web-based. Digests and archives are supported. The subscriber interface is also Web-based and easy to use.
Managing subdivision subscriber lists can be complex. Some lists restrict their subscriber base to subdivision members while others allow anyone to subscribe. INFORMS is careful not to send intrusive e-mail to members who do not wish to receive it, and subdivision list managers should be sensitive to their members' wishes as well. But unless records of unsubscription requests are kept and merged by hand, updating the subscriber list with the membership list will resubscribe members who have opted out, forcing them to unsubscribe repeatedly.
IOL and the Member Services Department of the INFORMS business office are developing plans to at least partially automate the list management process. Opt-out requests can be forwarded to the office and recorded in the members' database records. When subscription updates are produced, members who have opted out will be left off the list, so they will not be resubscribed when list managers update their subscriber lists.
Online Subdivision Reporting
Last year work on a set of online forms for subdivision activity reporting started. When they are available (around mid-year) these online forms will replace the printable forms currently available from the IOL subdivision page.
Subdivision Webmasters and mailing list managers in need of assistance should contact me at iol_editor@mail.informs.org or Associate Editor for Subdivisions Jayant Rajgopal at iol_subdiv@mail.informs.org.
Matthew Saltzman is an associate professor of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2001 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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