david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (10/03/88)
Oh, so Gene went ahead and deleted his backbone alias w/o telling
anybody about it. Gee thanks Gene. I s'pose that explains why there
hasn't been any backbone mail for a long time. :-(
I think Gene was partly right. We'd just gotten through a huge
argument over comp.society.women however, which colored the thinking
of a lot of poeple. But that's in the past, we merely have to keep
in mind what happened then while planning our next moves.
The part where I agree with Gene is that the 'backbone' didn't serve
the purpose which it was originally created for. My understanding is
that it's original purpose was largely to discuss connectivity, with
occasional discussions over network policies. 5 years ago connectivity
was sparse enough to make it an important issue in many places. Today,
what with PC Pursuit and NNTP, connectivity is pretty cheap. At least
within the US.
In fact I'd go so far as to say that connectivity is only an issue for
REGIONS now. There have been a number of good reports from people
describing what they've done on a city-wide or state-wide basis.
That leaves policy decisions. Now, to an extent policy is governed by
the individual site-admins. That is the policies within the site. But
there are also global policies which must be discussed. How is that to
be done?
Our choices are basically to either do it all in public or to do it in
some mailing list. Completely open discussion won't work, for the same
reason that we have governing bodies in our governments. (i.e.
congress here in the US and parliament most everywhere else). That is,
if *everybody* is able to talk then all that will get done is a lot of
shouting, some of it loud from people who want to be heard regardless
of how right or wrong they are.
That leaves a private group of some sort. But then this is what we've
had for a long time. The problems which I know of about this are:
-- people feel there have been 'bad' decisions.
-- people don't get to see the reasoning behind decisions,
but instead they are handed down from 'on high'.
-- Lack of participation by some of the backbone, both
in backbone activities and in Usenet itself.
-- Some backbone'ers are 'out of touch' with the needs of
the populace.
Some of these things are critisms are ones commonly leveled at ruling
bodies in general, so perhaps there is little we can do about it. That
these are factors of governments in general and not of Usenet's
'government' in particular.
Rather than present solutions I'm just going to toss out a few ideas.
I don't see any way of guarding against 'bad' decisions. Hopefully the
people sitting on the new 'governing' committee will be good people and
represent a broad spectrum of the network.
I feel that perhaps the old requirements for being on the 'governing'
committee need to be modified somewhat. As I said before, connectivity
isn't necessarily an overly important concern anymore. Instead I
would like to see it geared more towards people who have shown interest
in the running of the network and that they truly understand how the
thing works.
Non-participation maybe should result in removal? Or some general process
for removing someone from the 'governing' committee over any number of
reasons? Something like the "no-confidence" votes I hear about in
parliamentary countries?
Terms of office?
Individuals as members of the committee instead of sites? Or a mixture
of site memberships and individual memberships?
Voting by the populace on who should be in the committee(s)? The vote
being run something like a newsgroup-creation vote is run now.
More than one committee? (i.e. one centered on rule-making, another
on policy implementation, another on connectivitie, etc) Something
like there being a seperate committee now for moderators, another
for some of the NNTP managers, another for people doing newsgroup
gatewaying in/out of mailing lists and so forth..
Anyway I'm curious about what people think of this.
--
<-- David Herron; The official MMDF guy of the 1988 Olympics <david@ms.uky.edu>
<-- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
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