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