You can follow the Shepherd Park neighborhood through the Shepherd Park neighborhood email group. The group is open to all and can be found at [email protected]. It was previously hosted on Yahoo! Groups, but was transferred to groups.io in October 2019 when Yahoo ended its hosting service.

Topics include community announcements, special events, meeting notices and summaries, home repair referrals, and much, much more.

This .io group is not affiliated with the Shepherd Park Citizens Association or any other community organizations. Its current format was started by a neighbor in 2000 with the goal of providing a forum for neighbors to share practical information. The group has since become very popular and now has over 2,500 subscribers.

It is a lightly moderated group and members need to be on their best email behavior. In order to cut down on spam, all posts from new members are automatically put in moderated status. Pending messages are reviewed and approved several times a day. Members should review the group’s guidelines at Civility and Common Sense on the Shepherd Park Email Group.

To join the Shepherd Park email group, you can subscribe to the [email protected] website, where you can edit your membership and search message archives. You can also join by sending a blank email message to the following address: [email protected]

Below are the rest of the email addresses for the group:

• Post: [email protected]
• Unsubscribe: [email protected]
• Email Group Owner (Moderator): [email protected]
• Help: [email protected]

Civility and Common Sense on the Shepherd Park Email Group

From time to time, questions come up about the "rules" of the Shepherd Park email group. This email group was started in 1997 by Beth Allaben as an outgrowth of an
informal group of Shepherd Park parents with young children. The group expanded to include all interested Shepherd Park neighbors in 1999 and in 2000 the group was
formalized on egroups.com (which later became Yahoo! Groups) with 70 members.

Alex Kincannon joined Beth as a moderator in 2007 and the group transitioned to the groups.io  platform in 2019. Twenty-five years and 64,000 messages later, we have over 2000 members.

Over the years, the following guidelines have been adopted based on discussions and consensus among the group members:

• Post only information that is of direct interest to the Shepherd Park neighborhood
• No commercial postings
• No campaigning
• Identify yourself in your posts (e.g., a first name and your street)
• Think before you send

Below are some further tips on using the email group:

• Is your message useful, pertinent, or interesting specifically to residents of Shepherd Park? Is it something that should be addressed to the 1300+ members of the email group or is it really intended for one or two recipients?
• Is the purpose of the message relevant to the community in a non-commercial and non-political way? Our agreed-upon exception to this guideline is if the message
  concerns a special event at a local business or other places in our immediate area (no general advertising or blanket campaign messages).
• Is the tone and demeanor of your message appropriate for a broad audience? Would you say the same things to your neighbor face-to-face? To your grandmother? Over the microphone at the SPCA Potluck?
• What is the purpose of your message? Is it to communicate information or relate an experience that is relevant to our community or is it solely argumentative? Expressing an opinion (good or bad) about businesses or government services can be informative and appropriate, but ad hominem attacks on neighbors or public officials, particularly repeated ones, are not.
• Have you included a descriptive subject line, included all important information in the body of your email, and identified yourself? Have you deleted extraneous material (e.g., the digest list of messages that have nothing to do with the message you are sending)? Many email group members do not receive attachments and will not click on forwarded web links without knowing who is sending them and why.

Finally, a note on moderation. This email group is a lightly moderated one. New members' messages are automatically moderated, but most members' messages are not. It would be very time-consuming to moderate all messages, plus restricting message posting in that way would inhibit the openness of this group. However, members who are chronic flaunters of the usage guidelines will have their messages moderated, or in extreme cases, they will be removed from the group.