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Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84 chuqui version 1.7 9/23/84; site nsc.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!mtuxo!drutx!ihnp4!nsc!chuqui
From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.news
Subject: A proposal for a modified voting rule
Message-ID: <3215@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Sep-85 04:05:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: nsc.3215
Posted: Fri Sep  6 04:05:28 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Sep-85 07:35:34 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Uncle Chuqui's Lemming Farm
Lines: 51
Xref: watmath net.news.group:3674 net.news:3887

This is to some degree a followup on the whole discussion of vote fraud
and voting on new newsgroups. For a long time I've felt that voting on new
newsgroups is wrong but we just haven't come up with a better way yet. 

One of the real problems with the way we create groups is that there is
absolutely no correlation between the sites that pay the bills for the
net and the sites that coordinate where the net is going. A few major
sites and companies are spending a lot of money subsidizing the net,
and there are a lot of sites that simply don't carry their own weight
on the costs of supporting this network.

I think we need to realize that the net isn't a free lunch, and give
the people that pay the ride a stronger say in what goes on.

Lauren recently suggested a one site, one vote proposal.  I think we
need to go one step further -- each site gets a weighted vote based on
the support they feed into the network.

I propose the following rule -- each site can generate a weighted vote
on any subject. The weight of the vote is equal to the number of
OUTGOING news feeds a site supports.  This means that a backbone such
as hplabs would have a weighted vote of about 7, nsc would be 3, and a
leaf node that feeds news to nobody gets no vote at all. The weights
can be generated from the mod.map data, giving people a reason to get
their data in their and keep it up to date -- if you aren't on the map,
you don't exist. We exclude feeds between machines in the same building
since that isn't supporting the outside world.

Certain sites that add support to the net outside of normal feeds  --
heavily used mail sites, network gateways, or sites with people
involved in the administrative or maintenance of the net (people like
Spaf, Mark, Rick, and Lauren) get increased weights as well.

This means that the backbones have a much stronger say in what happens,
which is how it should be. Sites like decvax, ihnp4, hplabs, and the like
put a LOT of money into the net, and it is time people realize that there
ain't no free lunch. As it currently stands, someone from decvax (which was
putting in 100K a MONTH in phone bills a while back) has no more influence
in the net than the person in Moline with a 20 megabyte TRS16 and a 300
baud modem. This proposal means that the people who pay the bills have a
better chance of deciding where that money goes to, and the people who
don't pay the bills can't force their will on the net. 

This makes it quite simple -- like most of the world, you pay with your
wallet. If you don't like the way the net is run, you can put the
investment into it needed to fix it. If you don't, you get what you pay
for. 
-- 
Chuq Von Rospach nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA {decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui

Son, you're mixing ponderables again