Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!shelby!apple!bionet!kristoff From: kristoff@genbank.bio.net (David Kristofferson) Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genome-program Subject: Re: A bulletin board for chromosome 22 Message-ID: Date: 6 Nov 90 22:48:26 GMT References: Organization: GenBank Online Service Lines: 50 > Would it not be best to get a consensus from human chromosome chairs as to > having a single board for all chromosomes or 24 boards and voting > once on the lot? Martin, BIOSCI is only responding to proposals that we receive. It is not in our charter to orchestrate these types of issues. However I intend to agree with the other responder to your posting that the delay involved in trying to get universal coordination here would probably be prohibitive. The chromosome 22 newsgroup will be interesting if for no other reason than to see if researchers in that area adopt this mode of communication. If it is successful, then a larger effort involving other chromosomes might be warranted. I don't see this becoming a tower of Babel overnight at the rate these things typically evolve. I will also point out that BIOSCI has maintained the GENOMIC-ORGANIZATION newsgroup (GENE-ORG on BITNET/EARN and bionet.molbio.gene-org on USENET) for quite some time. I have occasionally been inclined to suggest that we shut that group down due to lack of use, but have refrained from doing so under the hope that it could be used as a general group such as you suggested. At one point I almost thought I had a couple of well-qualified moderators for it but that dried up unfortunately. I also suggested this to the Chromosome 22 folks, but they had enough people in their circle that they wanted to have a more specific newsgroup. Up until recently I was under the impression that the BIOSCI newsgroups were more useful from the standpoint of sharing experimental methods than for discussing scientific concepts, but I am happy to have been proven wrong by the population biology community on POPULATION-BIOLOGY (POP-BIO, bionet.population-bio). This group has been very active for the last month now after a "critical mass" was finally achieved. The result has been very impressive. Given sufficient patience, I remain optimistic that the same thing will happen on these other genome-related groups. Consider this message, then, as an open invitation to workers concentrating on other chromosomes to use the GENOMIC-ORGANIZATION newsgroup if one wants to get up and running quickly. However, if other groups want to organize individual newsgroups, we will be happy to put their proposals out to vote under our usual set of regulations. -- Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson GenBank Manager kristoff@genbank.bio.net Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com