🚀 go-pugleaf

[This post is somewhat belated. Before you respond, you might want to 
read the already existing thread in news.admin.hierarchies. Followup-To: 
is set there.]

2nd RFD  for a new Europe/a.* hierarchy on 4th January 2001.
============================================================

CHANGES from 1st RFD

New proponents added
New top level name option "europa"
Changes to the list of initial groups, for language consistency
New section added to stimulate discussion of sub-hierarchy structure
New proposals for hierarchy management

PURPOSE and location of discussion.

The purpose of this RFD is for potential users of the new hierarchy to 
continue to discuss important details which need to be fixed before the 
launch date. Discussion should take place in the international group 
"news.admin.hierachies" using the language of your choice and readers 
are also encouraged to post copies of this RFD to european national and 
language hierarchies, with translations where possible, indicating that 
responses should be sent to news.admin.hierarchies.

PROPONENTS

This Europa/e project is being proposed and promoted by 
         
Andy Roberts   <andy.roberts@zetnet.co.uk>
Mario Benvenuti <mario@computerville.it>
Martijn Dekker <martijn@inlv.demon.nl>

Anybody interested in helping out should contact one of these. 


RATIONALE.

A new hierarchy of newsgroups for topics covering the continent of 
Europe is needed. This will enable discussion between people from 
different european countries. Importantly, it shall be a multi-lingual 
hierarchy and no single language will have any privileged  status.


NAME

The first RFD offered two choices, europe.* and europ.*  europ.* found 
much opposition and several people suggested europa instead. Europa is 
the name of our continent in most european languages and is also easily 
recognisable to speakers of English and French. The proponents feel 
that the other alternatives, such as eu.*  euro.* and eunet.* each have 
some merit but also good arguments against them.

Therefore in this 2nd RFD we hope that a decision can be made between 
the two best options:
a) europa.*
or
b) europe.* 


INITIAL GROUPS

The suggested list of topics included in the 1st RFD was well received 
but the names were thought to be somewhat arbitrary.  It is not a good 
idea to mix European languages in the names of newsgroups, but they 
should not be in English either, as that would compromise the principle 
of language neutrality.

Instead, we propose newsgroup names borrowed from Interlingua 
<http://www.interlingua.com/> a neutral pan-European language that was 
designed by a team of linguists to be comprehensible for a maximum 
amount of people. These are clean, non-arbitrary international forms 
that almost everybody understands at first sight, no matter which 
European language they speak. 

europa.admin
europa.admin.information ( moderated)
europa.agenda
europa.commercio
europa.ecologia
europa.general
europa.migration
europa.politica
europa.politica.union
europa.politica.union.euro
europa.sport
europa.sport.football
europa.technologia
europa.telecom
europa.viages


SUB-HIERARCHY structure

Everybody has a different view on the best structure in which to 
arrange groups within sub-hierarchies. We propose two general 
strategies for consideration

a).  Create the initial groups as listed above and leave further groups 
and sub-groups to be discussed in europa/e.admin after the hierarchy is 
established.  

b)   Create a series of sub-hierarchies each containing a *.general 
group so that the europa/e.* structure cam expand in a pre-determined 
way. 


MANAGEMENT

During the first RFD, the suggestion of an elected committee with 
reserved seats for each of the larger countries and for all of the 
small countries was thought too ambitious and problematic. 

In order to get the project started, we propose to do it like this:

A mailing list will be set up for volunteers to contribute their skills 
to help make the hierarchy successful. Both technical and language 
experts will be needed to cooperate in order to launch europa/e. 
Documents need to be written and procedures carried out in order to 
make sure the new hierarchy grows and thrives with good propagation. 
The members of the mailing list will allocate somebody to act as 
administrator and create the agreed list of initial groups on the 
launch date. Further steps required to manage the hierarchy will then 
be taken in accordance with whatever group creation method is decided. 

This type of management will continue until there are enough people 
using the new groups to decide upon the most appropriate management 
method.

PROCEDURE

This is an informal Request For Discussion which doesn't lead to any 
formal vote. Constructive responses are welcomed in 
news.admin.hierarchies, to which Followup-to: is set.