More about the Nottingham Bi-Women's Group emailing list

How does the list work?

The list is the common type of email list, where any list member can post an email to the list (to a central address), and everyone else on the list receives that email.

People who aren't on the list can't see what you're posting (unless they are talented hackers, but that applies to any emails anywhere on the net).

You can read the list without writing back, if you like. In that case, the people running this list (which currently is basically me, Jennifer) will be able to look "behind the scenes" and see that your email address is subscribed to the list, but the other people on the list won't see you.

You can join the list either from the Yahoo site, or by sending a blank email to nbwg-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
In either case, you also need to send an intro to nbwg-owner@yahoogroups.com. See the Yahoo site for more about what you need to put in the intro. This intro will be read by the list owner and not the whole group, but you can post another later to the whole group if you want to.

How do I know that a message has come from the list?

You can recognise emails that come from the list because they will all have a subject line beginning "[nbwg]". That's automatically added by the list software - you don't have to put it in yourself when you write something to the list.

(Occasionally you may also get an email whose subject begins "[nbwg]" but which went only to you and not to the group. Usually, that will have been created by someone replying to a post you made to the list. In that case, the [nbwg] is there simply because when they clicked "reply", they kept the same subject line. You can find out for sure whether an email went to the whole list by looking in the "header" of the email. If it says "To: nbwg@yahoogroups.com", it went to the whole list. If it says "To: {your address}", it was someone writing directly to you.)

Some emailing software will allow you to group emails together that came from the same place. If your software can do that, you may want to set up a special mailbox for emails from the group, to make it easier to manage your email.

You may also be able to route emails through a "newsreader" program, so that emails on the same subject are "threaded" together.

(This depends on your own software, so it's not something I can explain exactly how to do.)

What's happening on the list?

Anyone's welcome to post to the list suggesting an event. Typically, what happens is that someone posts "How about doing X?" and someone else writes back "Yeah, I'd be up for that" and then people suggest what dates they can do or how they might organise it. Or if it doesn't catch on, then we don't do it. We mostly tend to make pretty foolproof suggestions, though, like "how about going to see this film?" which means that whether two people want to go or five or ten, it's still a pleasant activity for whoever does go.

Usually the person suggesting an event says whether they want it to be bi-women only, women-only, bi-women plus friends and/or partners and/or children, or whatever. We aim to have a balance, sometimes including family, friends & allies, sometimes creating bi-women-only space.

We aren't currently having regular group meetings (we used to meet at the women's centre once a month - see "history" below). If enough people want to, we could restart those too. But if that's not where people are at, we can use the list discussions to invent whatever we do want, whether it be social events or bits of activism.

As a group, we are trans-friendly: transsexual bi-women are welcome on the list and at all events, and transsexual women (e.g. partners and friends) are welcome at our women-only events. We go by self-identification and by whether someone's living and working day to day as a woman, not by pre/post/non-operative status.

There's been some interest in discussing bisexuality actually on the list, as well, but it doesn't seem to have happened much so far, possibly because we are all so busy all the time :-)

No email?

If you're reading this in an internet cafe or library, and you don't have your own email account yet, it may help you to know that there is such things as web-based email. If you get that set up, you can access your mail from public computers (or a friend's one) even if you don't have a computer at home. It does mean you won't necessarily get emails straight away - only when you get the chance to look at the web. One well-known service is at Hotmail.

(We don't currently have a good system for including people who can't get email at all. The best thing is to drop us a line at Nottingham Women's Centre, 30 Chaucer Street, Nottingham, NG1 5LP. We'll do our best to include you somehow, but we don't have loads of spare energy & time for ringing each other up, which is the very reason that an emailing list is so useful.)

Some people have an email account with their real name for work & friends, and another email account with a nickname for things like this. As you may know, you can choose your name when you set up an email account, so it's easy to set one up with a nickname.

History

NBWG used to have monthly group meetings at Nottingham Women's Centre (which is still our postal address). The group had a thriving phase around 1996-1998, with lots of people participating regularly, and lots of different events like brunches and partying. During 1999 it ebbed a bit, to the point where having regular meetings became unviable, and the group was more or less in limbo by late 2000. This list was set up in July 2001 to catalyse some things happening, and it seems to be working.

See also Jennifer's bisexuality index page
Back to the NBWG home page
Back to the NBWG emailing list page on Yahoo Groups