Goals
To provide a set web based mechanism to encourage communication between SLAC employees and collaborators with common interests, and to encourage people to discover common interests that they did not know they had. The system should encourage top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer communication.
Existing systems in use at SLAC and similar institutes
Send e-mail to random list of people
Mailing lists
People often refrain from using mailing lists because of the fear of spamming people not interested in a specific topic.
Hypernews
Hypernews has been used extensively by Babar, and is now also used by Geant4, Atlas and LSST. It has been very popular with users, especially the threaded discussion, ability for users to browse existing discussions and opt-in to those that interest them and the ability to receive and respond to messages either via the web or e-mail. The implementation of hypernews is somewhat old and no longer being actively developed.
Implementation: Perl
FUDForum
Implementation: PHP
Implementation: PHP