Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bionet!kristoff From: kristoff@genbank.bio.net (David Kristofferson) Newsgroups: bionet.general Subject: Re: And in the End... Message-ID: Date: 5 Feb 91 20:58:09 GMT References: Organization: GenBank Online Service Lines: 58 I am extremely sorry to see Rob Harper resign from IRLEARN. I am sure that everyone will agree that Rob's contribution to BIOSCI has been invaluable. I understand his motives, but believe that something good *will* come from all of this confusion during the last couple of weeks. BIOSCI has been an international collaboration between four different sites and has worked reasonably well for about 4 years now. However, I am as aware as anyone of all of its warts because I also have devoted a not insignificant amount of time to resolving the problems that Rob mentioned in his message. Because of the variety of systems involved, many compromises were necessary. Overall BIOSCI has been an excellent example of international collaboration in which many groups gave up their parochial interests in the interest of the scientific community as a whole. This enabled BIOSCI to grow rapidly and provide access to users from New Zealand all the way through Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. I have even had responses back about BIOSCI messages from research stations in Antartica! However, we can't rest on past accomplishments. Some technological compromises were made in the interest of bringing significant sections of the scientific community on-line as soon as possible. It is obvious that the time has come to review this situation again. I want to assure our users that we are having very frank and direct exchanges between the BIOSCI sites, and I expect that substantial improvements will be forthcoming as a result of this recent disruption. It is unfortunate, but usually it takes incidents like this to add fuel to calls for technological change. I will *once again* encourage our readers to look into getting news software installed at their sites, and also offer a bit of an incentive, i.e., the day may come when we finally decide to simply terminate e-mail subscriptions. I will continue to push in that direction, although I realize that, given our current feedback from readers, e-mail is still necessary. In my mind there is little reason why we could not set a target goal of phasing e-mail out completely within, say, about two more years. It may be necessary to put this kind of stick out in public to motivate people to respond. In the interim there are technological steps that can be taken to reduce and redirect bouncers. We have taken such steps at GenBank, but additional changes are required at some of the other BIOSCI sites. I believe that I will be able to report back to you soon on further progress. HOWEVER, I can not promise that this will be the end of our recent spate of problems. If the system is reconfigured and a mistake is made in the process, the potential for further disruptions still exists. I hope that our readers will bear with us through this transition period because I have full confidence that the final result will be more agreeable to the end user. Sincerely, David Kristofferson, Ph.D. GenBank Manager kristoff@genbank.bio.net