IMHO the psu-allemp is out of control. In a lot of cases messages are
posted 2 or more times, most of these to inform the community of events
that should be on a central calender coupled with a link to further
details. Also the organizations involved could provide an announce
list. Interested individuals could sign on to receive reminders about
upcoming events. From my view at the bottom of the pile it is becoming
easier to just delete any allemp and allfac emails as sorting through
them is time consuming and not very productive. Furthermore, it is
hard to see “real� emails through all the list emails.

Another area of concern is the use of “to� and “cc� addresses to
people both inside and outside the PSU community. Any address put in
these fields is visible and available to everyone who receives these
mass mails. While I am sure no one YOU know would give these addresses
to a spammer, it only takes one co-opted machine to compromise every
address in the email. If you need to send a bam to other addresses the
“bcc” addresses should be used.

Mark

And if the question requires a deeper level of expertise, the first responder will get the contact information of the requester and make sure an expert gets back to the person inquiring.

What if instead of the first responder making sure an expert gets back to them the first responder gets back to them personally?

The first responder could contact the expert for a solution then present the solution to the end user. This is not always possible, but when it is the end user only has to deal with one person and the first responder learns one more solution. People would rather hear “I’ll find that out and get back to you shortly” than “I’ll have someone contact you soon.”

This is as much about the first responder learning as about servicing the end user. With student workers coming and going frequently and only working a few hours per week while their here this type of just-in-time knowledge transfer is great training.