Making Selected NCF Newsgroups Available Externally From: David Blackwood To: aa331@freenet.carleton.ca Subject: Motion Date: Mon, 13 Mar 95 22:34:55 EST I would like to add a motion to the agenda to the effect that: Moved that the National Capital FreeNet make selected ncf.* newsgroups available upon request, and read-only if necessary, to the larger Ottawa online community. Thanks. -- David J. Blackwood From: David Blackwood To: aa331@freenet.carleton.ca Subject: Re: Motion Date: Tue, 14 Mar 95 12:27:32 EST This has been extensively debated in a number of newsgroups. Here is a copy of my most recent posting on the subject. Dave Newsgroups: ncf.agm95.general,ott.general From: dave@revcan.ca (David Blackwood) Subject: Re: Freenet BOD: Positions on Exporting of 'ncf' private newsgroups. Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 23:47:22 GMT Some months back I proposed a motion to the FreeNet Board of Directors, that the FreeNet export some or all of the ncf.* newsgroups to the rest on the local community via existing mechanisms. (Those existing mechanisms are an nntp feed with cunews, and the uucp connection from cunews to revcan.) I even offered to make that a one way export of groups by marking them all essentially read only, thus ensuring that only NCF members could post to those groups. That motion was overwhelmingly defeated. The general gist of the discussion was that the NCF's mandate was to serve its members and that the ncf.* newsgroups constituted a valuable resource for attracting and keeping an active contributing membership. I used every argument that I could muster to no avail, and attempted to counter all arguments to the contrary. Exporting newsgroups will reduce load, not increase it; it would make the FreeNet a better net citizen; it would help attract and retain more technical volunteers; etc. No go. The FreeNet board at that time wished to insulate the FreeNet as a community unto itself, separate, apart, and distinct from the non-FreeNet community. After today the FreeNet will have a new board and at the first opportunity I will re-propose my motion. However, given the amount of disinformation about news being stated by some authoritative and well known FreeNet users I remain unconvinced that a new motion will fare any better. In the meantime a new facility has been added to FreeNet that allows all of the non-newsgroup data on FreeNet to be made freely available to Internet users via a Web browser such as Mosaic, a facility that is not even available to FreeNet users. This should also have required Board approval, although I do not recall it ever having been brought forward. So now we have the bizarre circumstance where all of a sig's data for example can be read remotely but not the newsgroup that accompanies it. The reverse of what we had sought to do originally. Someone has suggested converting ncf.* newsgroups to ott.* newsgroups. For some limited number of groups, this is undoubtedly a good idea. Many ncf.* groups were created which should have been created under the ott, and in some cases ont and can hierarchies. In many other cases, this is not such a good idea. The NCF has tended on occasion to create ncf.* newsgroups for subjects for which perfectly valid and suitable newsgroups already exist elsewhere. Replicating the entire structure of Usenet under the ott hierarchy is no better an idea the replicating it under the ncf hierarchy was. The mechanism for creating a new ott newsgroup is to post a proposal to ott.general and see if it gets the support of the community. It's not unlike the procedure for a new can newsgroup which is posted regularly to can.config. (If there are enough new proposals we may have to create an ott.config to hold them. :-)) Beware though that few proposals succeed and none get rubber-stamped. Too often a proposal consists of little more that "I think x would be a good idea for the convenience of those of us using broken news readers, or who don't have the time to read news regularly." These types of proposals will not likely get the consensus required for creation. It is time that the FreeNet became a good news neighbour and not just a large news neighbour. A site's contribution is not measured by the volume of its postings. If it were it would be inversely proportional. And this is not a technical or a resource issue, it is purely a policy issue. And by the way, the FreeNet did approve a uucp connection to the local online community for the transmission of mail. It was up to the volunteers who requested this to implement it. This however is an separate issue entirely from the distribution of news. -- David J. Blackwood Systems Integration Manager Room 1139, 400 Cumberland Street Inter-Office Communications Section Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0L8 Office Communications Division Voice: 613 957-9305 Fax: 613 952-1095 Revenue Canada Internet: dave@revcan.ca