"The principal tasks on this listserv are to: (1) aid in professionalising the field of democratisation studies (through spreading information concerning conferences, book projects, calls for papers), (2) create common conversations uniting disparate research and practitioner communities within that field (i.e., ones whose efforts might be principally focused on, inter alia, assistance programs, waves of democratisation, or the development of rule of law, but who might gain from familiarity with the work being done in other research communities), (3) foster technocratic conversations (i.e., into best practices and lessons learned from prior efforts) among practitioners, and empirical and theoretical development among academics."