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From: vancleef@iastate.edu (Van Cleef Henry H)
Subject: Re: Reform Trial.* (was: Trial flawed)
Message-ID: <1991May30.234526.22586@news.iastate.edu>
Summary: Problems with Trial propagation spoil its value
Keywords: group creation votes preference
Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
References: <1991May30.144345.15890@gorm.ruc.dk>
Date: Thu, 30 May 1991 23:45:26 GMT
Lines: 33

Our experience with trial.soc.culture.italian indicates that the trial
hierarchy has some fundamental problems.  

1.  The trial hierarchy is not carried at too many sites.
2.  The net backbone does not propogate the news entries because of "holes" in
the propogation.  

We are presently conducting a vote for creation of soc.culture.italian.
The votes are being taken at another site, and I do not know what the
status is, but based on E-mail discussions I would expect the vote to
end up about the same as for the other soc.culture groups created recently.

Use of the alt hierarchy for "testing out" the concept of a group like this 
has a fundamental propogation problem in that many sites do not carry this
hierarchy.  Some of our support for this group comes from commercial sites 
in Italy---I do not know if these carry alt, but it is reasonable to assume
that their managements, like US company managements, would consider alt to
be neither work-related nor culture-related, and not carry them.  I know of 
private corporate networks who do carry the equivalent of soc.culture.*
groups as a part of their corporate culture.  My earlier comment that I
saw such groups for various countries as things that "ought to be" was, 
unfortunately, misunderstood, and I will reiterate, we are going through this
vote 100% strictly by the numbers.  

I do feel that in the long run the net community needs to consider methods
other than the voting process that can be used to get the idea of a particular
newsgroup in front of the people who would be reached by it.  I have not 
looked at the arbitron statistics for the readership of this group, but 
suspect that even the voting process, which seems to reach more potential
-- 
Hank van Cleef  
vancleef@iastate.edu	Iowa State University, Ames. Ia.
tmn!vancleef		The Union Institute, Cincinnati, Oh.