A day after Vital Communities announced it would end posting to the 38 town listservs it hosts at 8 pm tonight, the regional nonprofit yesterday partially back-pedaled. Its staff had faced a day of emails, phone calls, and annoyed listserv posts from users, as well as a back-and-forth and meeting with the list moderators, culminating in an announcement that it will extend the lists for an unknown period of time.
In a late-afternoon post to the listservs, executive director Ellen Hender wrote, “Thanks to those who reached out to Vital Communities yesterday following our town-based listservs announcement to share your stories about how the listserv has been a vital part of your days and community life. It's wonderful to hear how meaningful and impactful the lists have been. Thank you, also, to those of you who reached out to ask Vital Communities to slow down the timeline for sunsetting the listservs. We hear you and are working on a revised timeline. While we don't have an updated timeline just yet, we want to share that the active town-based listservs will continue operating beyond the 8/21 deadline that we provided yesterday. We will share an updated timeline as soon as possible but need a little more time to process the feedback from recent conversations. We will be in touch soon.”
Probably the most active pressure came from the lists’ 48 moderators and “owners,” many of whom have put in years of volunteer service trying the shepherd them. Though the group includes members who are comfortable with Vital Communities’ recommendation that listserv users move en masse (but through individual sign-ups) to Front Porch Forum, which is ubiquitous in Vermont towns outside the Upper Valley, it contains many others who are pushing for an email-based alternative or finding another organization to take over the existing lists. Most of them learned definitely of Vital Communities’ plan only a few hours before the public announcement that the lists had only two days to live, and they lobbied forcefully for more time to come up with another option. As of last night, those deliberations were still ongoing.
For a few towns, another option already exists. Back in July, former longtime Woodstock listserv moderator David Brown—who’d stepped down in April as controversy on and about that list and provocative postings from a few members grew in town—started up the Woodstock Community Exchange. It’s a “social media platform” that’s essentially a listserv and serves Woodstock and the towns of Barnard, Bridgewater, Hartford, Hartland, Pomfret, Reading, and West Windsor; people from other towns can join, but can’t post. A moderator vets posts before they’re sent out (as is the case with Front Porch Forum). Brown tells The Vermont Standard’s Erin Scott that it began with 50 subscribers and had 800 as of earlier this week—before Vital Communities’ first announcement.
Meanwhile, Upper Valley residents are already adapting. A raft of town officials, arts groups, and other organizations that have used the lists to get the word out about their events and activities posted to the lists yesterday encouraging readers to sign up to email lists, newsletters, or other forms of communication. Front Porch Forum has seen a surge of signups, though some list users have expressed reservations or found it to be harder to use than the email lists. You can get a sense of that in the Facebook discussion on yesterday’s Daybreak story post to the Upper Valley VT/NH Facebook group—including an offer by Upper Valley native Jill Savage, who is FPF’s director of operations, to explain how it works.
