WHY IS THERE A CONVERSATION?

Veterans of the historic Freedom Movement will tell you that for every hour of direct action there were ten hours of meetings, and hundreds of hours of conversation.  Conversations between followers and followers, between leaders and leaders, between those doing the organizing and those getting organized and more.  No broad-based movement exists without a vast amount of information and opinion passing between people.

WHAT'S A LIST SERVE?

A list serve is one of many ways the internet makes sustaining the conversations vital to our liberation (relatively) cheap and easy.  The Overground Railroad maintains a series of what are called list serves.  A list serve is simply a list of email addresses of people who want to listen in or take part in a particular discussion.  When a member of the list sends an email message to the address of the list, it relays (or "serves") that message to everybody on the list.  Members of the list can then follow or participate in the discussion by checking or responding to their email.

Register yourself on our site, using the "Login or Register" tab at the top of the page.  You will see a link to our community list serve pages when you complete the registration form.  You can also select one of the list serves from the bottom of this page.  For instance, if you're a minister, you might consider our Pastors and Clergy list.  Some churches have their own lists, or there might me a Blacks in Law Enforcement list, for instance.  

ONCE I JOIN A LIST SERVE, CAN OTHER PEOPLE ON THE LIST SERVE SEE MY EMAIL ADDRESS?

Unless you deliberately reveal your email address to others, only the list administrator and moderators can see your email address.

HOW MANY MESSAGES PER DAY OR PER WEEK WILL I RECEIVE?

That depends on how active the list is.  With some low traffic lists you might receive only a few messages per week.  High traffic mailing lists with lots of people discussing lots of things generate more messages.  You can choose to receive a single daily or weekly message which is a digest of all the groups traffic in a day or in a week.

I JOINED AN EMAIL LIST BUT HAVE RECEIVED NO MESSAGES

Check the spam or junk mail folder of your email application.  Some email programs classify messages from any and all unfamiliar sources as junk.  Usually you only have to do this once.