Agenda Item - export news Please crosspost any discussion on this subject to both ott.online and ncf.board-discussion-unmoderated. This request is put in mostly for the NCFfers, as the newsreader on NCF does not automatically do this. Jessica Cohen will also monitor both groups to catch any stray relevant threads. Any questions for the taskforce can be emailed to: xx724@freenet.carleton.ca if you have a reason for not wanting to post them. All mail on this issue is going to be passed onto our task-force mailing list. Thank you, Jessica Cohen Chair, Export-News Taskforce Export News Report, October 11, 1995 ======================================== This proposal summarizes months of discussion, including some "off-track" discussion. There are several parts to this proposal: 1) Preamble 2) Site agreement for Ottawa sites a) How the site agreement will work b) What will be in the site agreement c) What is NONAG, and why is it proposed? d) What about the rumours of NONAG administering ott.* groups? e) NCF fundraising concerns * notes 1 * notes 2 3) Export Restrictions on ncf.* groups. 4) Some Implementation Details 1) Preamble =========== A motion to export NCF newsgroups has come before the NCF Board of Directors twice previously. The first time in early 1993, the motion was to export the ncf.* hierarchy without restriction to whomever wanted to carry it. In April 1995, David Blackwood made a similar motion and invited Chris Lewis and Michael Richardson (two local news administrators) to speak about the various different methods which could be used in implemention. A motion in favour of exporting NCF newsgroups in principle was passed. A taskforce was struck to study the issue and bring to the Board of Directors a set of parameters for exporting news. The current membership is Jessica Cohen (aa724), Matthew Darwin (aa673), Yvonne Dionne (ao594), Miranda Gray (ak717), Chris Hawley (ah654), Chris Lewis (clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca), John Stewart (aa104) & Paul Tomblin (ab401). The taskforce has come up with the following draft proposal summing up several months of discussion via mailing list and two live meetings. There has been some discussion over the (sketchy & incomplete) minutes in ott.online, and some more lengthy discussion in ncf.board-discussion-unmoderated. This document should answer any questions arising from those just reading the minutes. 2) Site agreement for Ottawa sites ================================== a) How the site agreement will work Any site wishing to carry ncf.* groups will either have to consent to the agreement before receiving a feed. A site wishing to carry the NCF groups will ask either a site which is willing to feed them the groups or NONAG (NCF-Ottawa News Administrators Group) [see notes 1] to mail them a copy of the site agreement. After agreeing to the terms, the new site will mail a letter to NONAG to confirm that they agree to abide by the agreement. When NONAG has received confirmation, they will notify the site to begin feeding the new site. This set-up allows the newsgroups to travel through normal protocols, rather than placing an unnecessary burden on the NCF news-server. b) What will be in the site agreement 1)- an agreement not to feed ncf.* groups to any other site without confirmation from NONAG that the new site has agreed to the site agreement 2)- all sites must be in the National Capital Region 3)- the site must have a defined acceptable use policy, and the site maintainers must be willing to enforce it. (The NCF, BNR AUP, and/or the OCUNIX AUP's are available as samples.) 4)- Any site that is unable or unwilling to police their users will lose their feed. 5)- All sites must be able to respond to complaints, warn and/or remove abusers and/or newsgroups when necessary) 6)- This site agreement will only be changeable by the NCF Board of directors. NONAG cannot change the content of this agreement without due process. N.B.: Accompanying the site agreement will be an FAQ about the agreement. c) What is NONAG and why is it proposed? The acronym stands for NCF-Ottawa News Administrator Group. NONAG is what the majority of the export-news task force felt should be responsible for administering the site agreement. (see appendix 1) The purpose of NONAG is to have an impartial Ottawa-wide group which will be able to respond within 48hrs to various site-admin issues. e.g setting up new sites or dealing with potential problems when sites cannot or will not follow the site agreement. NONAG will not be responsible for creating new ncf.* groups (which remains within the jurisdiction of NCF alone). The proposed membership of NONAG is 7 members: 2 representatives from NCF, 1 rep from Carleton University, 1 rep from BNR, and 3 to be chosen by the previous 4. (A call for nominations will be posted in ott.online.) The 5 non-NCF members must be newsadmins for sites which carry the news. The export-news task force's suggestion was that among potential sites to be represented are be Revenue Canada and the University of Ottawa (other sizable local news contributors). Why NONAG? For several reasons. 1) It was felt by the taskforce for impartial decision making (for example when a site is cut off from the feed), it is necessary to have an Ottawa-wide body make the decision. 2) To handle site administration it is necessary to have volunteers who are familiar with how usenet travels in Ottawa, are familiar with news administration, and can make the commitment in time. The experts on how usenet works in Ottawa are Ottawa's news admins. d) What are these rumours I am hearing about NONAG also being responsible for ott.* groups? There is currently an ongoing discussion, admittedly outside the mandate of this taskforce, about formalizing the creation of ott.* groups. It is the opinion of this committee that NONAG is also the logical group to fill this role. However, if this turns out not to be the case, it makes little difference to the proposal being made here. e) NCF Fundraising concerns But if people don't login to NCF, how will NCF be able to ask for donations? It is technically trivial to set-up a system whereby where the NCF Director of Development will be able to post fundraising notices in selected NCF groups. These postings will be seen only by readers not reading the news on NCF itself. It will not interfere with the internal fundraising messages that appears during login. The system will not place any additional technical demands on the Director of Development. The taskforce has some suggestions concerning netiquette and frequency. * Notes 1: Although a majority decision was reached about proposing NONAG, it was not consensus. It was suggested by the nay-sayers that the site agreement should be administered solely by NCF, with the Board, the Exec committee, or the export-news taskforce being suggested as potential arbiters. The site agreement information and in fact all of the above information could still be proposed in that manner with appropriate modifications. * Notes 2 The fundraising issue came up in response to a suggestion that all site would make some sort of fundraising deal (ie messages at login) with NCF in order to receive a news feed. It was decided that this was impractical, as many sites would not realistically speaking be able to do this. 3) Export Restrictions on ncf.* groups. 1. All IP's (information providers, this will not include SIG maintainers) will be mailed to tell them about the upcoming change, with a notification date they will have to notify the taskforce by if the wish that their newsgroups not be exported. This notification will also have to include the reasons behind it. 2. All moderated newsgroups will be setup with a mail-path directing them to one machine (e.g. freenet-news) which will look at the mail path, and either pass the articles on to the correct moderator, or will send back an automated message telling people that to post in the moderated newsgroup in question, they must be logged into NCF. The default will be to send the auto-message, moderators who wish to receive outside postings will be able to have this changed. The purpose of this is to allow people to read the moderated groups without putting a burden on the moderators of these groups. 3. A public announcement in ncf.announce and some of the high-traffic SIGS will be made about the change, so that any SIG which doesnt wish to be exported can discuss and vote on the issue before the notification date included in the announcement. A mechanism will be setup for new SIGS to state whether they want to be exported or not, with a clearly stated reason if the SIG suggesters decide against exporting. 4. All ncf administrative groups (ncf.admin*,ncf.board*,ncf.sub*, ncf.status*,ncf.help*) will be exported. ncf.board-discussion-moderated will allow outside postings to go thru to the moderator. 5. The archival groups (the agm'94 and agm'95) groups will not be exported. 4) Some implementational details The recommendation of the taskforce is that a) The ncf.* heirarchy be exported in 3 stages. first stage the administrative groups, second stage the SIGS third stage the IP groups b) Other NCF committees are currently working on fixing the naming structure in parts of the ncf heirarchy. The export-news taskforce recommends that the more major changes be made before the ncf.* groups are exported. This will not affect the first stage of exporting news.