List owners are the people who have been selected to administer an email list. The owner can be the person who created the list or they can be someone else who is merely affiliated with the list creator.  It might also be someone who works at the same organization as the list creator or someone who is working on the same issue for an allied organization.

We expect list owners to take care of the day to day functions of the list, such as: inviting and deleting subscribers, adding and deleting moderators (for moderated lists) and taking care of other administrative functions. There are a couple reasons why we ask this of list owners:

1. We host over 1,000 lists with roughly 185,000 subscribers, so if we were responsible for inviting and deleting subscribers, we'd do nothing else, all day long, every day and we'd never get anything else done.
2. Many lists are confidential in nature and as such, we prefer that someone from the organization (or issue) in question, be responsible for ensuring that only trusted subscribers are invited to join the list. For example, many organizations host their board of directors list with ONE/Northwest; due to the sensitive nature of board discussions, we'd prefer not to be responsible for inviting or deleting people to those sorts of lists.

What does ONE/Northwest do? ONE/Northwest hosts the lists, meaning that we keep the Sympa software up to date and ensure that it operates smoothly. We answer questions related to the software and how to configure it to meet your needs. Or if there are technical questions that are beyond the realm of knowledge of owners, or subscribers, to answer, then we will help with those.  But if there is something that we expect list owners to do, and do on a regular basis, then we will let you know. That is, you can ask for help, but we will likely direct you to a list help page or give you instructions on how to perform the needed task.

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