richard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton) (10/18/89)
It has been pointed out that procedural mistakes have been made in the
call for votes for sci.aquaria.
My first reaction is (with a pinch of :-) ``so what. the votes
appear to be coming in anyway''.
The point was mae that the discussion period was two days shy of
a full load. Like so many things on USENET this both is and isn't
true.
I posted the original call for discussion on a Monday, but didn't
get around to sending one to Greg for news.announce.newgroups until
wednesday. So if you read news.groups, you saw 14 days worth (?)
of discussion (?), whereas if you only monitored n.a.g you
saw 12 days worth.
Now, in the early stages of the discussion, I thought it was
fruitfull; I would make a point, it would be rebutted, I
would rebutt that.
This degenerated, as things do on USENET, to a flamefest. People
were bringing up arguments I had rebutted two and three times
without getting a response to those rebuttals.
The people who want a sci group (notice thats a plural) are adament
about this, and do not appear to have seen an argument that has
changed their collective mind.
Combine this with the distressing letters I got stating ``I'm afraid
to state my opinion because I have no desire to get flamed''and it
appears reasonable to conslude that 1) two more days of discussion
will accomplish nothing, 2) two more years of discussion will
accomplish nothing, ie, letting the discussion run until a
resolution is acheived seems unlikely.
Thusly, I called for votes, just to get the damn thing over with.
At this point I made another procedural error. I posted the call
for votes on the second Monday after the call for discussion
was posted. I posted it at 2:30 in the morning and said voting
starts on Monday at midnight. I meant two and half hours ago,
not twenty one and a half hours in the future.
A change to the procedure for creating new groups just zipped through
here that detailed the voting period to be 21 days instead of 30.
Thats fine with me. The voting period, then, is that period
between 00:00 hrs Monday, October 16, 1989 and 23:59 hrs
Sunday, November 5, 1989.
One final note to forstall any cries of ``but you broke the
RULES!!''.
As spaf said when nobody would create rec.fu... uh, .sex:
``They're guidelines, not rules''.
Congratulations for reading this article all the way through. This
is the most boring thing I can remember writing.
--
Help wipe out BBQ lighter fluid in your lifetime
richard@gryphon.COM decwrl!gryphon!richard gryphon!richard@elroy.jpl.NASA.GOV