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From: arnold@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Ken Arnold%CGL)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: New newsgroup proceedures, voting..
Message-ID: <787@ucsfcgl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 10-Mar-86 16:06:44 EST
Article-I.D.: ucsfcgl.787
Posted: Mon Mar 10 16:06:44 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Mar-86 03:29:29 EST
References: <5075@alice.uUCp> <3326@sun.uucp> <1195@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: arnold@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Ken Arnold)
Organization: UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
Lines: 38

In article <1195@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU> gds@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Greg Skinner) writes:
>My model of how the USENET voting procedure would run is similar to
>that of the electoral college.  Each site gets to vote based upon how
>many feeds they have, whether news developers are at that site, or
>news moderators, or uucp map keepers, or what have you.  These factors
>will have to be weighted of course.  The site vote is cast in the
>person of the news administrator.
>
>There are those who seem to have a problem with this scheme.  I wonder
>why this is so.

Well, my problem with this kind of idea is only that net administrators
are not elected themselves.  My net.admin is a reasonable person, but
there can be no reasonable expectation that this will be true
everywhere, or even most places.  If some jerkface runs my site and
only puts in votes as *s/he* wants things run, without caring what
anyone else wants, and I don't have the sort of pull around my site to
do anything about it, what happens?  Your analogy with the Electoral
College falls down at the selection of the electors.

I also don't have any way to know how my sa is voting.  Maybe s/he is
telling me that our site voted *for* a group when we really voted
*against* because s/he personally opposes it.  At the least, each sites
vote should be *posted*.  Of course, then when most people at a site
are in favor of, say, net.jokes, there can be side effects.  After all,
some manager may not care if they get net.jokes, but to be out in
public on the net saying so might not be very politic, so maybe that
won't work either.  Secret ballot is part of democary, too.

How would you resolve this dilemma?

>I guess what I am tryng to say is that fair is fair.  What goes on in
>USENET should not be decided by a select few, it should be decided in
>a democratic manner.

Yeah, exactly.

		Ken Arnold