lampman@heurikon.UUCP (Ray Lampman) (03/21/89)
Usenet is a community of about 1/2 a million people at 12,000 sites around the globe. We post an average of 2000 messages per day. But who are we? I've been kicking the idea of a USENET CENSUS around for a couple of months. I think it would be interesting to find out who we really are, demographically speaking, no names, please. The people, I've mentioned this project to, have been interested. Now, in the "Spirit of Usenet", I'd like to hear what the community thinks of the idea. First of all, what do YOU think, is a census of the usenet community a worthy goal to pursue? If it is, and since I'd like this to be a community project, I may eventually need help in a number of areas defining the specific goals of the census, designing the actual census survey, determining how to protect the privacy of individual responses, distributing the survey to the community, collecting and summarizing the results, prepairing a summary to be returned to the community. If we do decide to take a census, we should be able to distribute the survey to the community sometime near the end of 1989, and have results collected and summarized by early 1990. We can call it the `1990 USENET CENSUS', possibly the first, with others to follow, 1992, 1994, 1996, ... -- I say what it occurs to me to say, when I | Ray Lampman 608 276 3431 think I hear people say things, more I can | Madison Wisconsin USA Earth not say. Oh, my cat, I call him `Moose'. | uunet!uwvax!heurikon!lampman