Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!xenitec!edhew
From: edhew@xenitec.on.ca (Ed Hew)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Some observations on this whole mess.
Summary: perhaps only newsadmins should vote?
Keywords: votes, newsadmin, coordination
Message-ID: <1989Nov13.071055.9401@xenitec.on.ca>
Date: 13 Nov 89 07:10:55 GMT
References: <11171@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <2752@cpoint.UUCP> <6803@ficc.uu.net> <1989Nov4.170406.11407@alembic.acs.com> <6819@ficc.uu.net> <1989Nov7.010805.12319@alembic.acs.com> <6854@ficc.uu.net> <1989Nov8.175742.26013@alembic.acs.com>
Reply-To: edhew@xenitec.UUCP (Ed Hew)
Followup-To: news.groups
Organization: XeniTec Consulting Services, Kitchener, ON
Lines: 37

In article <1989Nov8.175742.26013@alembic.acs.com> csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) writes:
>BFD. The net's gotten bigger, too. According to the latest arbitron stats,
>there are over half a million people who read news. The total number of
>votes cast here is in the noise. In five years, a thousand NO votes
>probably won't be unusual. As an additional data point, the total number
>of votes cast is less than 10% of the number of news system administrators
>on the net, assuming one newsadmin per site in the arbitron stats. In
>other words, Peter, over 90% of the people who are most likely to be
>concerned with the namespace structure didn't care enough about whether
>the group was in rec or sci to bother to vote. No wonder you're trying
>to get a 100 NO vote limit installed. You can't even convince your peers
>that you're right.

....and on the topic of wild ideas....
Perhaps each newsadmin would accept opinions from his/her news readers
and then issue one single "vote" for that site.  As it is quite true
that the size of USENET is growing almost exponentially, each newsadmin
in effect acting on his own user poll would serve to temper the flood
of weighted opinion from individual sites (there were some complaints
re. this point recently).

There are precedents in some political systems.  Sometimes elected
officials make our laws, sometimes the bodies involved in lawmaking
aren't elected at all (eg. Canada's appointed Senate - I'm not trying
to justify this, merely to illuminate this possiblity).  Would such
a system be viable or even desireable?  Should all valid votes originate
from "usenet@site_name" ?

Spare the flames, I'm merely posting a point for discussion.

Would one vote per site be viable?

>Dave Mack

  Ed. A. Hew       Authorized Technical Trainer        Xeni/Con Corporation
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