mark (11/24/82)
It has been suggested that there be either a panel discussion or a BOF in San Diego for USENET. While the idea is appealing, my initial reaction is that net.news has a constant meeting going on and that most issues can be discussed there. Nonetheless, we have an opportunity if we want one. I see two possible benefits. One is that people who have been meeting electronically for years can meet face to face. Another is to somehow help out new sites that want to join up, and/or to make sites on UUCP aware that they aren't on USENET and could be. What do you think? Do you want either a BOF or panel discussion? What kind of issues do you see discussing? Mark
tas (11/27/82)
Please, Mark, you don't really want me to meet floyd!trb and harpo!ber, do you??? Heaven forbid...(sorry, guys, it's been a late night...). (Hope I never have to apologize for signing my name (though it's too late now.)) Tim Seaver
whm (11/30/82)
I definitely think that there should be some type of a Usenet-related
meeting at Unicom, but if it's well announced, it would be likely to
attract hundreds of people, and as such, if a BOF format is used,
(i.e., no format) things could get out of hand, resulting in a complete
waste of time. The panel discussion idea seems reasonable, but you
have to find panelists and things for them to discuss. The basic
problem seems to be that the primary function of a meeting of a large
number of of individuals is usually to disseminate information or start
a riot. On the other hand, a panel discussion might be fun and would
certainly be more entertaining to me than a presentation about a DBMS
that runs on a 68000 system.
As far as topics to discuss: (in no particular order)
Handling the influx of new, naive users with a yen
to post articles to net.general.
New user education in general.
The problem of periodic questions. Ex:
uucp for non-unix systems
Lisp for Pdp-11's (haven't seen this one in a while)
Language X for machine Y
Driver for device X (ittvax!swatt seems to have a good
idea wrt. this)
Questions like: "where did the name 'a.out' come from?"
Periodic discussions, the one about the Origin of the World
being foremost in mind, followed by abortion issues.
The missing person department, e.g. "Is John Smith on the
net?", is "John Smith Univ. on the net?".
How to decide what group an article should be posted to, when
mail/news should be used for a reply.
Usenet etiquette.
Is Usenet spelled U-S-E-N-E-T or u-s-e-n-e-t or U-s-e-n-e-t?
How about some semi-written bylaws?
What should net.general be used for?
[There may be nothing accomplished, but like I said, it'd be fun.]
Some topics to avoid:
net.jokes, net.jokes.q, ug.jokes, ...
It seems to me that Unicom would be THE ideal place for new sites to
seek out connections to Usenet, but there needs to be some organized
means of connecting "haves" with "have nots", perhaps a bulletin-board
dedicated to the purpose. Postings could be separated into "looking
for a connection" and "looking to add a site" groups. If some vendor
wanted to be really nice, you could set up a simple minded system
on their machine to list sites in the above two groups. (Nothing too
fancy, have a file for each group, a little shell script that builds
an entry and appends it to the appropriate file.)
I'd also like to see a BOF (note--BOF) on mail related issues, I think
that that might be of a manageable size.lsk (12/03/82)
Perhaps USENET users could wear some kind of distinctive badge at UNICOM so we could recognize each other???? - Larry S. Kaufman, Western Electric, Network Software Center, Lisle, Ill
trt (12/06/82)
Distinctive badge for Usenet users at USENIX/Unicom? How about a button with an exclamation mark on it?
davidson (12/09/82)
I hope that the topic of ug.all WILL be included in any UNICOM discussions. This is because I think that ug.all is very important to the quality of the network. My reasoning follows. I think that without ug.all we will have to live with continuous complaint from people offended by newsgroups (net.db, net.suicide), by some submissions to some newsgroups (especially net.jokes), and so on. We will also have to live with continuous complaint from people who are offended by any limitations on their freedom of expression. I also think that there are a number of topics which are worth discussing but which will offend a significant number of people. A network which provides a place for such things is therefore a better network. I think that the way to solve these problems in the long run is to make sure that all new news programs forward ug.all, and to have it be much easier to deny one's own users access than to shut off forwarding.. Greg