LAWS@IU.AI.SRI.COM (Ken Laws) (04/18/88)
It seems that I will be taking leave of absence from SRI to work at NSF for a couple of years, starting this July. (I will report more details later.) AIList will thus need a new moderator by mid June. Any volunteers? I suspect that AIList has become too much for an inexperienced moderator to handle alone. About half my effort has been spent editing seminar and conference announcements, so I suggest dropping those or spinning them off to another list. (Usenet has a widely read conference list; perhaps it should be used for AI notices also. I have had positive feedback about the seminar notices, but they seem out of place in a discussion list -- and provide little that one cannot get by scanning the latest conference proceedings.) Separate lists might also be created to handle AI-related hardware/software queries and discussions, expert systems, AI in business and engineering, logics, commonsense reasoning, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, etc. We should try to follow the Usenet list structure where possible, but the most important ingredient is an enthusiastic moderator or administrator. Setting up a discussion list is not terribly difficult. All you need is the ability to remail messages to a bunch of people, preferably in batch form to reduce the number of bounce messages from broken connections. I can help with such mechanics as determining return paths for messages having nonstandard header syntax. The postmasters on the net have always been very helpful, particularly Erik Fair at UCBVAX. If no moderator is found, AIList will continue on the unmoderated Usenet comp.ai stream. There are advantages to this format, including fast turnaround and ease of saving or replying to individual messages. (Disadvantages include lack of thematic grouping and of editorial screening.) Someone on the Arpanet (or other network?) could redistribute the messages much as I have done. Submissions could be sent directly to the comp.ai gateway, or to the Arpanet redistributor if the gateway manager preferred it so. I am not sure whether gatewaying to BITNET must go through the Arpanet, but something can be worked out. I have enjoyed being the moderator, and will continue to participate in discussions. Thanks to all of you for making this effort such a success. -- Ken Laws