Managing email data

Meta
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In the community call on 3 October, we were discussing getting folks’ contact data for a few different purposes.

The main one we were discussing was being able to find people who would be willing to act as editors and/or reviewers.

Others include being able to keep in touch with folks about developments within the community generally, updates to published packages etc.

I (@KirstieJane) was a huge debbie downer by bringing up the dreaded GDPR which puts a lot of requirements (compliance) on ethical and responsible data management for anyone holding data about EU citizens.

What that means for these mailing lists is that people need to be able to audit and remove the data held by PyOpenSci about them whenever they want, and it probably makes sense to use a data management tool that is itself GDPR compliant rather than creating a new process.

This discourse topic is to brainstorm processes that work for other communities and balance the need to be transparent and compliant with legislation and making it really easy for folks to say that they’re interested in participating and helping out the community.

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For my projects I use tinyletter (owned by mailchimp) for mailing lists.

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(I’m only allowed 2 links per reply, sorry for being bitty)

The Carpentries manages their mailing lists through TopicBox (announcment blog post) so that might be worth looking into.

How do rOpenSci manage their data?

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Just finished doing some of this research myself. Yetiforce is a good option - open source and GDPR compliant, with customer support on Github. I ended up using HubSpot myself, which also is GDPR compliant (if you select that mode in the options) and pretty bare bones for the free version.

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@aprilcs HI!! welcome to the pyopensci community :slight_smile: so psyched to have you hear. @KirstieJane thank you so much for the info above. @noamross might know how they manage their email lists! i just pinged him but can also ask them on slack. it would be so helpful to have a good way to manage emails. and the carpentries is a great model to follow but i’d love to know more about things like hubspot as well.