As of August 2008, We've started using our own domain name for e-mail addresses that are given to Earn A Computer students.

Several of the items on this page are in the process of being implemented, such as customizing a welcome message, and organizing students' e-mails into groups by class, to help with tracking e-mail usage and maintaining contact w/students.

• Branding of Bworks.org
• Better availability of usernames (bob@bworks.org is available. bob@gmail.com is taken)
• Easier management and tracking of who's using bworks email addresses

Google domains offers the following benefits:

• Bulk creating of emails
• Monitoring email usage
• Spam filtering
• Automatic virus scan of attachments
• Very good uptime and reliability
• Bworks members can see other members who are online and available to chat. This could lead to better communication with former students.
• An option to turn off the Google ads that appear in Gmail.

Google Apps has free services for non-profit agencies: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html

When creating students' email addresses, we should send them all a “Welcome” e-mail that has a courteous “congratulations” message, as well as some of the following items:

• Link to bworks.org
• Phone number of Byteworks
• Link to childrensprogram@bworks.org or some other list-type e-mail address that they can use if they have trouble, etc.
• Link to safekids.com
• Something fancy, like an attached picture, so they can see the fancy stuff that they might want to do with their e-mail.

We could group each classes' e-mail addresses into groups, such as eac.2008.04@bworks.org to easily send upgrade notices, and to try to maintain better contact w/students.

We might use a different “subdomain”, such as alum.bworks.org or grad.bworks.org for students. This would have the following advantages:

• bob@alum.bworks.org would be distinguishable as a former student, whereas bob@bworks.org would be distinguishable as a volunteer.

A disadvantage to using something like grad.bworks.org is that it's more difficult to remember and type in. If students and their friends can't share email addresses easily, they tend to just go to hotmail.com or gmail.com and create a new email address. This would defeat one of the goals of giving students a bworks.org email address.

• Ask the students what they want their username to be, and we would create <username>@bworks.org for them.
• Another idea might be to assign usernames using a traditional first initial, 6 character last name convention: nwheelo@example.com since there could be several bobs. bjohnso@ bbaker@ bsmith@

• Organize the website using the subdirectory structure bworks.org/alumni/2008/byteworks/session1/
• Make shell accounts with a public_html directory so interested staff/volunteers/students could have one and a web folder that is served by their username a la bworks.org/nneff
• Use a good content management system like a Drupal for organizing wordy content with multiple contributors, (implies that we have dedicated content contributors otherwise it might as just well be hand coded static HTML) and set up URI redirects correctly to let the search engines catalog the dynamic content correctly.