🚀 go-pugleaf

In my university there is a discussion going on about how to provide a
Campus Wide Information Service, and proposals are being considered that
would involve developing new special software in collaboration with a
commercial firm.

I doubt the wisdom of this, given the existence of Usenet.

My suspicion is that on top of Usenet software, with a good interface
for novice users (who would need guidance on traversing a local
hierarchy of information) one could provide a very powerful system that
would work on a large number of machines with very little effort and
would also have the advantage of allowing special categories of
information to be provided by any users, unlike the typical CWIS
designed or selected by administrators, etc. with different interfaces
for different kinds of users. (E.g. experts would not be forced to use
the Novice interface.)

The news reading software I have seen so far has clearly NOT been
designed for the typical novice who has probably never logged in to a
computer, certainly won't have an account with a .newsrc file, and
merely wants to find out the latest annoucements in some category
(e.g. campus concerts, or philosophy society meetings), or who wants to
find out a phone number, or which administrator deals with postgraduate
admissions, etc.

However, my conjecture is that combining this kind of local information
service with usenet would be fairly easy (though some of the "articles"
would have to have a very long life, and a rigid format, e.g. one piece
of information per line).

So I wonder if anyone on a university or university-like site has
already done it and could let me know, preferably by email as our usenet
disk is too small and posted replies often get purged before I have a
chance to read them, since I can't do it every day!

Thanks for your help and apologies if I have posted to the wrong groups.

Aaron Sloman,
School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, England

    EMAIL   A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
            A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
    Phone: +44-(0)21-414-3711
    Fax:   +44-(0)21-414-4281
-- 
Aaron Sloman,
School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, England