csa-vote@zorch.sf-bay.org (Amiga Vote Mailbox) (12/03/90)
This is the official call for votes for the comp.sys.amiga newsgroup
heirarchy reorganization. Accept no substitutes. Forge no newgroups.
This is a complex proposal containing fourteen separate votes; read it all
carefully TWICE before voting, then check your work before sending your
vote. Do NOT post votes; only email votes count, only timely votes count.
A companion article, updating the call for discussion information, has been
recently posted to news.groups and the comp.sys.amiga heirarchy. This call
for votes contains only the voting instructions and the ballot showing the
actions to be taken.
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VOTING INSTRUCTIONS
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Below is a ballot. There are two groups in the existing heirarchy being
retained. two existing groups being renamed, and twelve new groups being
created in this proposal. The retained groups are not being voted upon,
but are included for information purposes only. For the other fourteen
items, your voting choices are one of the three letters at the start of
each proposal line in the ballot:
"Y": "Yes, carry out the proposal,"
"N": "No, do not carry out the proposal," or
"A": "Abstain - I do not care to vote for or against the proposal."
Abstention is included as an option because this is really fourteen
separate votes, and if they were presented as fourteen separate
postings, any voter would be able to skip any vote. Since voting all on
one ballot is for the convenience of the vote taker, it seemed unfair to
omit this possibility from the options.
To vote, capture this article into an edit buffer and delete the two
letters you don't want, so that the one remaining represents your vote,
for each item. Leave the ballot lines alone otherwise; they will be
used as search strings for the script processing the vote. Please
make sure you leave exactly one of "Y", "N", or "A" at the start of
each ballot line, followed by a space, as your ballot will otherwise be
kicked out for hand processing. It will make my life easier if you
take out the ">" or whatever your buffer capture mechanism puts in
front of the vote lines, too.
To save bandwidth, those skilled with an editor are encouraged to omit
the rest of this article from your vote, just leaving the ballot lines
and perhaps a signature. This is not required; the votes will be
captured by an awk script anyway, after being eyeballed by the vote
taker.
A separate account has been established to handle this vote.
Mail the result of your editing to the voting address; a reply to this
article should get the right address: csa-vote@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG. Check
that it did, and if not, send to this address anyway.
If you have trouble getting through to that address, here are a couple
of alternate ways to say the same thing:
zorch!csa-vote@ames.arc.nasa.gov
ames.arc.nasa.gov!zorch.sf-bay.org!csa-vote
Please avoid sending votes back to Eliot. If the address says turbo.bio,
you've done something wrong.
If your mail to all these voting address bounces, I will (very
reluctantly) accept votes at one of the two addresses in my signature.
Contrariwise, send mail you expect to be read to one of the addresses
below; mail "R"eplies to this posting that contain gossip will probably
drown in the vote mail and never be seen.
Exactly _one_ attempt will be made to email a response to your vote. If
it bounces, look for your vote in the mass acknowledgements to be posted
at mid-vote and the end of the voting. [Due to the size of the response
and the worldwide distribution of voters, I'll try to publish a second
mass acknowledgement to news.groups and the Amiga groups the weekend after
this CFV comes out, but get your votes in early if you expect to check
for it in the second mass ack.]
The usual USENet rules hold: 21 days to vote from the first posting date
of a call for votes for this proposal in in news.announce.newgroups (26
November 1990); for each proposal, 2/3rds or more Yes votes and at least
100 more Yes than No votes (abstentions will not count in either
category); five days to complain about incorrectly scored votes, vote
fraud, etc. after the ballot period ends.
As mentioned during the discussion period, while the rules require a
vote on each proposal, I (the vote taker and convener of the proposals)
would much prefer a straight Yes or straight No vote, since it is not
immediately obvious that every subset of the proposals would be better
than the existing comp.sys.amiga heirarchy.
The effect of a yes vote will be to partition the existing c.s.a traffic
into more, focused newsgroups with smaller traffic per group. The result
of a "no" vote for any particular group will be to continue including
that group's articles in other c.s.a groups, leaving the traffic in
those groups less focused and higher in volume. Any other effects of
creating/failing to create the groups are probably speculation, as are
other proposals to accomplish the same result.
Just as an aside, the number of people objecting to the names shown was
such a minute handful of the more than 50,000 readers who saw the
proposal, the names proposed in the CFD3 document have been carried
forward unchanged.
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BALLOT
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--- Retain comp.sys.amiga.games (information only--don't vote)
--- Retain comp.sys.amiga.hardware (information only--don't vote)
-----------------------8<--------- cut here --------- >8-----------------------
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.misc (renames comp.sys.amiga)
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.programmer (renames comp.sys.amiga.tech)
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.announce (moderated)
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.reviews (moderated)
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.introduction (monitored)
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.audio
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.graphics
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.marketplace
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.multimedia
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.applications
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.emulations
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
YNA Create comp.sys.amiga.datacomm
YNA Create comp.unix.amiga
-----------------------8<--------- cut here --------- >8-----------------------
\ /
`-- leave just one of these three letters for each line.
The two renamed groups will be deleted under their old names after the
usual aliasing mechanism has had an opportunity to reroute late arriving
postings under the old names.
The moderator for comp.sys.amiga.announce will be:
zerkle@iris.eecs.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle)
The moderator for comp.sys.amiga.reviews will be:
HONP9@jetson.uh.edu (Jason L. Tibbitts III)
Both of these will have a backup moderator for vacations, illness, etc.:
mwm@decwrl.dec.com (Mike Meyer)
the backup rerouting will be done by scripts without impact on the posters
to the groups.
The monitor for comp.sys.amiga.introduction will be:
ferry@chorus.fr (Ferry de Jong)
wish him luck at maintaining a polite atmosphere in the group.
Again, an explanation of all of this is in a companion posting, as are
postings containing more detailed charters for three of the groups. You
are well advised to read the companion articles in news.groups or the
comp.sys.amiga groups before voting.
Persons who have sent proxy votes due to being called to service in
Saudi Arabia, due to southern hemisphere summer school breaks, etc.,
need not vote again if your proxy was acknowledged and you are
unexpectedly still around reading this -- your voting instructions will
be carried out by the vote taker. You know who you are.
Persons _absolutely_ unable for whatever reason to fill out this ballot
may send me _clear_, _unambiguous_ voting instructions at the csa-vote
address and I will fill out a ballot for you, add it to the votes, and
mail a copy back to you for your records.
Persons unable to email offsite (I just found out such people existed!),
may, with the cooperation of a person with off site email privileges,
vote as follows. 1) Fill out and email your ballot to that person. 2)
Have that person put your _entire_ vote letter in a shar file and mail
that file to me. This allows me to file a ballot for you with a separate
userid, timestamp and message ID in case anyone wants to challenge the
ballot. The shar file should use line prefixes to avoid mailer problems
with the enclosed letter's header lines (usually the line prefix is an
"X"; for many shar and Unix implementations, saying
shar -a -pX my_vote_letter | mail -s "shar-ed vote" csa-vote@zorch.sf-bay.org
after saving the letter as "my_vote_letter" will do the right thing).
Don't vote often, but do vote early; I'd like to have the results to
Eliot in time for his posting the second weekend after this is posted,
which means I have to shave a few hours off the voting period. I can
only do this if votes stop coming in before then. Due to normal USENet
delays, votes mailed less than 48 hours from the end of the voting
period risk failing to reach me to be counted in any case.
Whew!
/// It's Amiga
/// for me: why
Kent, the man from xanth. \\\/// settle for
<xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us> \XX/ anything less?
--
Convener, ongoing comp.sys.amiga grand reorganization.