Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!shelby!apple!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!kristoff From: kristoff@genbank.bio.net (David Kristofferson) Newsgroups: bionet.general Subject: Re: Proposal for Human Chromosome 22 Electronic Newsgroup Message-ID: Date: 27 Oct 90 04:06:56 GMT References: <1990Oct26.125840.3122@nlm.nih.gov> Organization: GenBank Online Service Lines: 26 David, Thanks for your vote to form the newsgroup. I expect at the rate votes are coming in the group will be approved soon. Regarding voting procedures, Eliot Lear who manages the bionet USENET groups here, and who has considerable experience working with netnews software, happens to be (not coincidentally 8-) the moderator of news.announce.newgroups, the main USENET newsgroup in which calls for new groups are put out. He is intimately familiar with USENET regulations. The rules that you cite are for the major USENET domains such as comp, rec, sci, etc. The bionet groups are not required to adhere to those guidelines since they are a small specialty set. Our current regulations were worked out by common agreement among the BIOSCI/bionet managers at our various distribution nodes. Biologists are not yet present on the net in numbers comparable to computer scientists, and to hold them to rules set up by computer scientists would effectively prevent the formation of almost any newsgroup at this stage of development. -- Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson GenBank Manager kristoff@genbank.bio.net