Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!decwrl!reid
From: reid@decwrl.dec.com (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Corporate Image
Keywords: do you have one?
Message-ID: <688@bacchus.DEC.COM>
Date: 5 Aug 88 19:54:40 GMT
References: <7047@tness7.UUCP>
Reply-To: reid@decwrl.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Organization: DEC Western Research
Lines: 42

In article <7047@tness7.UUCP> mechjgh@tness7.UUCP (Greg Hackney ) writes:
>
>Do you administer Netnews for a large corporation ?

Yes. Digital. Paul Vixie also administers netnews here, but when push comes
to shove, I'm the one who takes responsibility for the wrath of vice
presidents.

We pass almost all newsgroups. I think there are 3 that we don't pass, and
those 3 were stopped by me and not by some upper-management type.

Digital thinks that netnews is important. Rather than have the high-ranking
administrators in the company make decisions about the details of how it is
administered, Digital just puts a reasonably senior person in charge of it,
and then holds him responsible in case of problems. Same way Digital handles
almost everything else.

We see no difference between frivolous newsgroups and frivolous newspapers or
magazines. Our lunchrooms have copies of Business Week, but they also have
copies of Metro (a local left-wing newspaper), Redbook, and the National
Enquirer. Our computers have copies of comp.sources.unix, but they also have
copies of talk.politics.mideast, soc.women, and alt.flame.

We believe that how an employee spends his time is a matter between
that employee and his supervisor, and that if the employee and the supervisor
both believe that reading netnews is an acceptable thing to do, then it's
available to them. Very few supervisors demand that their employees never go
read magazines in the lunchroom; we expect that very few also demand that
the same employees never go read random newsgroups.

We do not believe that there is any reflection on the image of Digital for
the newsgroups that we choose to pass or not pass to our news neighbors.
USENET is a cooperative venture, and we are just doing our share. Just
because we choose to pass misc.origins or alt.flame doesn't mean that we
endorse anything contained in them. In fact, we believe that our willingness
to pass virtually every newsgroup helps our image far more than the
sophomoric content of some of those newsgroups might hurt our image.

Brian Reid
Consulting Engineer
DEC Western Research
Palo Alto, California