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From: mjc@nl.cs.cmu.edu (Monica Cellio)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Give it up, folks (backbone cabal)
Message-ID: <6921@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 10 Nov 89 17:42:26 GMT
References: <3329@watale.waterloo.edu> <11263@cbnews.ATT.COM> <36339@apple.Apple.COM> <10119@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Lines: 32

Chuq proposes a Namespace Committee and emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward 
Vielmetti) asks how this is different from the Backbone Cabal in the "Bad
Old Days".

First, it's different from the backbone cabal in one important way: there's
a way to bypass the decisions of the Namespace Committee.  If you don't 
like what they say, you have a vote the same way you do now.  The committee
would simply speed up the process for the 90% of the groups that are not
controversial, and separate the questions of whether a group should exist
(which is what most people care about) from the question of the name (which
only a few people care about).

Second, what precisely was wrong with those "Bad Old Days"?  If the Cabal
ever decided to squash a group (having never been a member of said cabal, 
I can't say with certainty just what happened back then), then the
discussions intended for the new group would just happen somewhere else 
anyway.  The cabal seemed to me to be pretty reasonable about groups.  Also, 
back then there was no alt hierarchy; a Cabal is considerably less powerful 
with the presence of alt.*.  The namespace committe -- which is not the
cabal -- will not be in any position to squash anything *as a committee*.
You're seeing now that *individual admins* might partially squash
sci.acquaria, but that has nothing to do with any cabal.  

Also, the committee that Chuq proposes is not self-appointed; he doesn't
elaborate, but mentions election as a possibility.  There's also nothing
that says it's for life; it's similar to a proposal that Brad made many
months ago for a similar committee that changed one member every month (I
think).  I think it's perfectly reasonable to somehow appoint such a
committee with, say, staggered one-year terms.

Monica Cellio
mjc@cs.cmu.edu