Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!apple!chuq
From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Cabals, Committees, Voting, ad nauseum
Message-ID: <28669@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 9 Apr 89 23:15:16 GMT
References: <6503@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps
Lines: 58

>Such a
>large group cannot reach consensus...as evidenced by flame wars in
>news.groups and the collapse of the old backbone group ("cabal" to the
>sensationalist). 

Just a further point of history. The term 'cabal' was coined by yours truly.
Spaf's claim to it being sensationalist is definitely true, beacuse it was a
term I used first during a time when various factions of the backbone and I
were in disagreement over something or other (I think it was the 'great
renaming'). Much like the once-popular 'net.fascist' it was designed
specifically to describe how I then felt about the way the backbone was
operating (to show how important these flamewars are in the long-term scheme
of things, I no longer know who I was arguing with or what it was about.
Think on that when you start the next "end of the net as we know it"
argument: will you even remember what you were yelling about a year from
now? Not likely....)


Spaf's view is essentially how I remember it, also. My view is very similar
to his as well. Everyone is running around and arguing semantics and
nit-picking proposals (tha amount of silly side-bickering over my use of the
term "he who pays the bills..." has been both amusing and eye-opening...).
None of what I've seen has really tried to deal with the one reality of
USENET -- that there is *no* way to develop a set of enforceable rules. What
you *can* do is get a general agreement to abide by a set of parameters, as
long as you don't then go and try to redefine the parameters out from under
people -- Rick's suggestion is simple, straightforward, and as close to
enforceable as anything I've seen. 

Everyone is so busy arguing the details that we aren't looking at the broad
picture. What do we want? What is good for USENET? Everyone is so busy
putting togehter rules, nobody bhas yet stopped to think if the rules make
sense.

I suggest that all this rule-making and vote-taking be put on the back
burner while broader, more important questions get looked at. What is
UESENET? What is USENET's focus? Why does it exist? Where should USENET be
in a year? In five years? 

If you can come up with consensus definitions of these questions, what rules
and procdures USENET need will fall out and become trivial to define. The
problem with the ad-hoc rule-generation that we've been doing is that we
keep reacting to given situations without really understanding what kind of
result we want from a given rule -- we're big on "don't do this" but not
very good at "this is what we want".

Maybe if we try to plan USENET and stop being purely reactive things will
get better. It certainly isn't working the current way...



Chuq Von Rospach       -*-      Editor,OtherRealms      -*-      Member SFWA
chuq@apple.com  -*-  CI$: 73317,635  -*-  Delphi: CHUQ  -*-  Applelink: CHUQ
      [This is myself speaking. No company can control my thoughts.]

USENET: N. A self-replicating phage engineered by the phone company to cause
computers to spend large amounts of their owners budget on modem charges.