🚀 go-pugleaf

Chris Lewis wrote:

> Right.  So, instead of a reasonably public process across all of ott.*,
> you're exemplifying a group like ott.singles which is run by a far
> tighter cliche than even Hans believes ONAG to be, diametrically 


I hope you mean clique, us ott.singlers don't like being called cliche,
it hurts our social life. Who the heck is Hans? (hey, great name for a
Dr. Seuss book though... Horton Hears a Who.. Who the Heck is Hans?)


> to any growth or divergent ideas, behaving rather like a roving pack of
> rabid dogs or old west vigilante gangs.  At times our very own alt.flame.
> 


To some extent, vigilantism is newsgroups is good. Whatever you may
think of groups like ott.singles with a number of established regular
participants, we sometimes get discussions going and there's relatively
little spam or crossposts. Compare that to ott.general, which could
benefit from some protectionism... went in there this morning to 55 new
messages, only 8 of which were local and two of those were ads.
Ott.general is often just too general to warrant trying to fight off
inundation from the can.* hierarchy to start something. How many Allisat
messages can you read before there's measurable deterioration of your
brain?


> Charters can be written in such a fashion to be enforceable.  One would
> have a rather hard time imagining, for example, that the charter for
> ott.business.ads is "useless" and/or irrelevant.
> 

Let's be fair though, groups like ott.business.ads are fundamentally
different from discussion groups. Discussion groups do (and should have)
more latitude to be divergent on topics. Because of this, I don't see
what power a charter really serves. Reality sometimes just doesn't mesh
with the ideal that you build. In a small local newsgroup you invariably
wind up with "regulars" and those people who, simply due to time spent
in participating, become more untouchable than random new users. I'll
make up an example to illustrate: some guy in ott.motorcycles who has
been around forever giving good motorcycle tips has more legitimacy
going off on a tangent about home-made tequila than some random new user
does, it's just the reality of newsgroup life. Perhaps you do not
participate in non-computer non-internet-related newsgroups, I don't
know, but to some extent I'm sure it happens in the tech groups as well.


> That's the entire point about the process including solitications for
> input from other related groups.  If noone can be bothered to pop over
> long enough to say "good idea!", there ain't going to be very much
> interest in the group.

But there is a flaw here that you're overlooking. This method does not
so much reflect user interest, but reflects the promotional capabilities
of the organizer. There may be a very large user base for a group like
ott.music but its creation is dependent largely on the access and energy
the organizer puts into whipping its potential users into being vocal.
On the other hand, there's probably a lot less interest in
ott.creative-writing, but I betcha a beer that if I go post into
nortel.talk, and into writing groups, the mailing list, and into the
ncf.sigs.writers group, and I nag the hell out of my friends, that I can
get a whole lot of them to make a token appearance in ott.config to
support it. As I am trying to demonstrate, this speaks less to userbase
or actual value than it speaks to organizational ability and
effort-expended of the promoter. This is partly why I think a group such
as ONAG should expand its role to solicit opinions of groups that have
not necessarily been proposed, this makes you a provider to the
community, not merely a reacter.

As it stands, OTT users who do not also have NCF accounts are
marginalized by the structure, but NCF users can access OTT just as
easily as they can their own groups. Obviously this isn't your doing,
but there is something you can do to help rectify it. I guess the
essential question really is: what role does ONAG want to play?