Xref: utzoo news.groups:4523 news.admin:2595 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!spaf From: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin Subject: Re: Democracy at work: Big brother is watching Message-ID: <4342@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> Date: 14 Jun 88 18:46:31 GMT References: <56436@sun.uucp> <15613@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <10932@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU Reply-To: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University Lines: 108 Some people have pointed out that there were 160 "no" votes for comp.women. Correct. But there were also 272 "yes" votes -- from people who felt the naming issue wasn't important enough to keep from creating the group. Seems to me that 272 > 160, hmmm? 272 is an a lot of people to express an opinion, too. Some people holler about the "content" of comp.women not being appropriate. They aren't the final judge of appropriateness (if anyone is). There is a significant percentage of netters who believe comp.women, as proposed, is appropriate for the comp hierarchy. Again, over 270 people who expressed their opinions felt that the group was appropriate enough in comp (or that the issue didn't matter). Furthermore, how can people complain about the "content" when the group hasn't even been created yet? Some people think there is a naming problem...that groups like comp.edu, comp.risks, comp.women, comp.org....shouldn't go in comp. Others think they should be under a common subheading like "comp.society". Many think they are fine as is. Some don't care. There is hardly a clear consensus to this, and trying to resolve it to everyone's satisfaction could take months. Meanwhile, the comp.women group gets held hostage because people are so terribly concerned about the name of the group...or so they claim. I'm sure most of the people who object on grounds of the name are upset about exactly that. The rest are probably upset because the vote didn't go their way, and because the majority of netters expressing an opinion didn't agree with them. Right now we have about 4 camps in the backbone group: * one group wants to go ahead and create comp.women then deal with renaming issues as a separate action -- renaming comp.risks, comp.edu, comp.women, etc all at once, if needed, and rename the binary groups, etc. Only two people have expressed this opinion so far, myself included. * one group is hell-bent on preventing any group with comp.women's charter from ever appearing in the comp hierarchy, no matter what. They want only "technical" groups and "technical" discussions (like the discussion of sandals in comp.org.usenix, for instance). I count one backbone admin being very rude, plus one other in this group so far. * one group will not accept comp.women as a name, but they want the group created...someday, somewhere. They want to discuss alternative names, conduct polls, and generally delay for an indeterminate amount of time. Others in this category have pre-emptively set up local name aliases for the group so that if it gets created there will be no uniform name throughout the net. This group numbers at least 4 so far. * The last group hasn't voiced an opinion yet, and perhaps just doesn't care. That's about 35 people. So, the question is what happens from here. I don't know. Rick Adams has threatened to start a "rmgroup war" if *anyone* (myself and other backbone admins included) issues any "newgroups" for comp.women. One other admin has indicated he will recompile his news so that automatic newsgroup creation requests will be disabled. I'm not going to issue a "newgroup" on comp.women because it will just cause problems. I also am unlikely to list it in the active groups list or the checkgroups message I post, because a "rmgroup" war would be a disaster for the net, and I don't want a couple of children to disrupt things further. Bob Webber at his worst caused less confusion than this, altho he tried :-) Obviously, I'm pissed. I'm also in the minority on the backbone at the moment, it seems. I think the vote was clear, the name is close enough for the time being, and there is a very able moderator in place to ensure appropriate postings. The whole issue of naming needs to be addressed at once instead of piecemeal and unfairly targetting this one group. Further, the group is desired by a significant number of people, even if named comp.women, and it shouldn't be held hostage by a few admins who are upset that the vote didn't go their way, and because the charter of comp.women doesn't fit their idea of "comp." A discussion of appropriate naming could take months, and it isn't fair to the moderator or the people who voted "yes" to not create the group while that is going on. The Usenet used to be a fun place. It also used to be a friendly, cooperative environment. I used to enjoy it. Now we have people who are willing to disrupt the whole net because other people have a different conception of "comp" than they do. They are ignoring the wishes of a clear majority of netters expressing an opinion, and they're willing to be quite rude about it. They think the naming scheme is so clearcut and perfect that they're willing to do anything to "preserve" it against this "threat." I've had to endure a lot of abuse and irrationality from people simply because I have volunteered to keep the lists and try to bring some order to things. Now I'm getting abuse and frothing-at-the-mouth behavior from some of the backbone admins I always thought were reasonable folks. Either they're out of line, or I am, and I don't know which. If it's me, however, I'm packing up my postings, unsubscribing from news.all, rmgrouping news.announce.newusers, and dropping off the net -- if I'm that far off the beam, then I can't do the job properly anymore and it's time to fade away. What the other 35 or so "silent" backbone admins have to say will tell me if I'm the one who's lost it. I hope that helps explain Chuq's posting. -- Gene Spafford NSF/Purdue/U of Florida Software Engineering Research Center, Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004 Internet: spaf@cs.purdue.edu uucp: ...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf