🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <32uu2f$gs7@news.ycc.yale.edu>,
Una Smith <una@doliolum.biology.yale.edu> wrote:

>As of this summer, newsgroups within the bionet.* hierarchy
>are not all voted on before creation.  This applies to
>bionet.prof-society.* newsgroups, of which there are already
>several, moderated, for the distribution of occasional
>official news from professional societies to their members.
>Several more are proposed that would carry discussion among
>members.  These latter discussion forums may or may not be
>voted on, depending on the preferences of the individual
>proponents.
<snip>
>These newsgroups are all gated to mailing lists, so should
>you decide not to carry them at your site, due to lack of
>interest or the extremely topical nature of these groups,
>you won't be depriving any down-stream users of the chance
>to use these resources.

I didn't want to get in the Dave vs Una debate, but this affects me as
I am trying to get a professional society (not the CFBS one) into the
bionet.prof-society.* hierarchy.  Una, what is the reason for this
post on news.groups?

Bionet isn't part of the Usenet 7, and they have a competent and
responsible administration with stated and open discussion policies.
They just happen not to release vote counts (neither do most federal
governments).  Bionet issues are not discussed in "news.groups".
Bionet issues are discussed in the open in "bionet.general".  At least
you could have done us the courtesy of crossposting to
"bionet.general" (which I have rectified).  For many biologists,
bionet.* is the only newsgroup hierarchy that they read (and
sometimes, I don't blame 'em).

You are bringing an internal bionet policy, which was decided by a
vote of bionet readers and subscribers, into "news.groups", IMO quite
inappropriately.  Is this because you're not getting your way, so that
you can alienate the whole hierarchy from system administrators WHO
HAVE NOT FOLLOWED THE WHOLE DEBATE IN bionet.general?  That's hardly
fair.

The issue which was passed is to allow professional societies with
>=500 members a newsgroup in the bionet.prof-society.* without having
to run a vote. This is not somebody posting to "control", newgrouping
an alt.fan.club on a whim.

I'm sure (for argument's sake) if a controversial professional society
were to request newsgroup access, there would be a discussion about
the pros and cons - were somebody to object.  Hopefully, then we'd get
the resulting censorship debate right then and there on
bionet.general, where it belongs.

ALSO... some professional societies are setting up unmoderated groups
WITH a vote.  Do you want to dis-enfranchise them with blanket
statements like yours?  Mailing lists are a PITA compared with
newsgroups, and if newsgroup access can be made available, please
don't spoil it for others.

cordially,
john


-- 
John Nash                          | Email: nash@nrcbsa.bio.nrc.ca
Institute for Biological Sciences  | http://cansnd.cisti.nrc.ca/~nash/home.html
National Research Council of Canada|  for an eclectic collection of
All opinions are mine, not NRC's!  |  WWW molbio and other services.