From sustag@beta.tricity.wsu.eduThu Mar 9 23:56:34 1995 Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 17:18:42 -0800 (PST) From: "Tom Hodges (moderated newsgroup)" To: Principles of Sustainable Agriculture Subject: New Sust. Ag. Disc.: SARDBB ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 14:30:09 -0500 (EST) From: Bob Hart To: sardbb-l%nygate.undp.org@nygate.undp.org Subject: short version AN INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE IN A GLOBAL INFORMATION EXCHANGE PROCESS The United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Sustainable Energy and Environment Division (SEED) and INFORUM (an international NGO that supports global electronic partnerships) invite you to join and use the Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD) FORUM. Because SARD spans issues as diverse as soil biology and world trade, SARD-FORUM has been set up as a matrix of Electronic Mail Lists rather than as a single List. The matrix is formed by 3 hierarchical levels: Nation, Community, and Farm; and 2 disciplinary foci: socioeconomic and biophysical (as depicted below). Disciplinary Foci: System Levels: _ Socioeconomic Biophysical _ Nation | NATION-SOC | NATION-BIO | SARD Community | COMMUNITY-SOC | COMMUNITY-BIO | FORUM Farm |_ FARM-SOC | FARM-BIO _| SARD-NEWS HOW TO SUBSCRIBE TO SARD-FORUM TOPICS When you join SARD-FORUM you have the option of subscribing to the whole matrix (subscribe to SARD-FORUM), a column (subscribe to SOCIOECONOMIC or BIOPHYSICAL), a row (subscribe to NATION, COMMUNITY, or FARM), one or more cells (e.g. NATION-SOC, FARM-BIO), or to SARD-NEWS which will be used for news about upcoming events as well as for updates on changes in the SARD MATRIX. To subscribe, send an email message in the format: subscribe listname name@internetdomain where "listname" is a cell, column, row, SARD-NEWS, or SARD-FORUM and "name@internetdomain" is your internet email address. Leave the Subject line BLANK. Send the message to: majordomo@undp.org HOW TO SHARE YOUR INFORMATION WITH YOUR COLLEAGUES SARD-FORUM is an information exchange process, not an electronic magazine where others do all of the work and you read the results! You can, of course, simply subscribe to the SARD-FORUM mail lists and download information from others, but the primary purpose of this electronic forum is to SHARE information. To help structure the information exchange process, please classify what you are going to share into one of 5 categories: NEWS: short (3 pages or less) descriptions of upcoming SARD related events that your organization is sponsoring that might be of interest to others, REPORTS: short (3 pages or less) technical description of an activity, methodology, preliminary results, etc. that you think might be of interest to others, COMMENTS; brief (2 or 3 paragraphs) reaction to a REPORT you received from a SARD-FORUM List, QUESTION: concise (2 or 3 sentences) asking if anyone has any experience with a technical issue you are working on, and ANSWER: short (3 pages or less) response to a technical question that was sent to a SARD-FORUM list. Before sending a REPORT or a QUESTION, take a few moments to select the most appropriate List. In general, unless the subject matter clearly covers multiple cells in the matrix, send your information to one of the cells (e.g. community-bio) rather than to a column or a row. Write up your NEWS, REPORT, COMMENT, QUESTION, or ANSWER in a memo format with a header that includes the DATE, TO, FROM, and SUBJECT. In the TO heading put in the name of the List where you are sending the information (e.g. TO: FARM). In the FROM heading put your name, address, and email address. In the SUBJECT heading put a descriptive phrase that includes one of the words: NEWS, REPORT, COMMENT, QUESTION, or ANSWER. Make sure the information is in ASCII format. Send it to a List within the SARD-FORUM matrix using the format: listname@undp.org where "listname" can be any of the 6 cells, 3 rows, or 2 columns in the SARD Matrix, SARD-FORUM or SARD-NEWS. For example: nation-soc@undp.org, farm@undp.org, socioeconomic@undp.org, or sard-news@undp.org, etc. WHO RUNS SARD-FORUM? SARD-FORUM is currently managed by a steering committee composed of Friedel von Mallinckrodt (email address: friedel.mallinckrodt@undp) from UNDP/SEED, Malcolm Chapman (Malcolm@undp.org) from UNDP/DAIS, and Bob Hart (bhart@undp.org) from INFORUM. As more institutional partners join in supporting SARD-FORUM, this committee may be expanded. The possibility of setting up interconnected regional multi-language versions of SARD-FORUM is under consideration. Please contact any of the SARD-FORUM steering committee for more information.