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From: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: Promoting "inet" to "world"
Message-ID: <15022@oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: 30 Jan 89 08:54:13 GMT
References: <5917@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
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Reply-To: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson)
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In article <5917@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> spaf@arthur.cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) writes:
>Thus, I believe that the time has come to turn the "inet" groups into
>regular "world" groups.

For most of the "inet" groups, I agree.

Some of the "inet" groups are very low volume and participation, and
probably should be left as mailing lists.  (soc.culture.esperanto is
probably one of these.)

There is also an issue with which Internet mailing lists got converted
to "inet" groups in the first place.  It seems to me to have been done
purly on Eric Fair's whim, dispite his stated policy at the time of
the create of the inet groups that all Internet mailing lists in Rich
Zellich's list of lists would be made into inet groups.  The
info-prime mailing list (which is on the list-of-lists) has not been
gatewayed into a inet group.  I pointed out the ommision to Eric soon
after the initial creation, asking for it to be added or the policy of
creating inet groups to be clarified.  After a more than reasonable
time (3 months) I publicly asked for a clarifaction from Eric in
news.groups.  Other than a "I'm a very busy person, I havn't had time"
responce, I got no explanation of why esperanto discussions deserve a
wide distribution and Prime computers don't.  Since then, Eric has had
time to create several more inet newsgroups, but apperently not
comp.sys.prime.

Without a real, published and working policy on how mailing lists
become inet groups, I can't realy recomend that all inet groups be
blindly converted to wider distribution.  Each new group should have
to justify itself by expected interest.  Also, mailing lists that were
not converted to inet groups should have an equal chance to be
promoted to net wide groups if an exception to the voting rules is
made.

(I maintain the info-prime mailing list, send subscription requests
etc. to the info-prime-request address below.)

-- 
Bob Larson	Arpa: Blarson@Ecla.Usc.Edu	blarson@skat.usc.edu
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