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From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.misc,news.stargate,news.sysadmin,news.admin
Subject: Re: Spaf Pro-vote / Plea for Order
Message-ID: <1099@killer.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 5-Jul-87 03:02:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: killer.1099
Posted: Sun Jul  5 03:02:03 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Jul-87 06:16:55 EDT
References: <6948@shemp.UCLA.EDU>
Organization: Bayou Telecommunications
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in article <6948@shemp.UCLA.EDU>, dgreen@CS.UCLA.EDU says:
> I'll throw in my vote that you are doing a good job under trying 
> circumstances.  However, as I have expounded at length in the 
> moderators/backbone mailing lists, I feel very strongly that the net.anarchy 
> has to end soon before we destroy the emotional stability of our fearless 
> leaders and the confidence of the readership.  
> 
> It really is time for a USENET constitution, or at least a set of clearly
> specified rules.  Otherwise this flaming stuff just keeps getting bigger.
> I've seen it happen before, in less electronic, but equally loud
> constituencies.

I must say that I agree. There's a variety of issues that need to be settled:
The problem of network flow and connectivity (the current ad-hoc approach to
getting a net connection isn't too effective, the sites at the ends of the
draw often have two-week delays, and many sites have a very hard time finding
a connection), the problem of unpopular actions taking place, the problem of a
vocal minority making it appear that an action is unpopular when it really
isn't, and other things of that nature.

I think it's time for the Net to graduate from being an anarchy, to being a
democracy.

I also think that the vote should be detirmined by the number of mail and news
feeds that a site has. With outgoing feeds getting a much higher value than
incoming feeds.  The guys who pay the most should have an appropriate voice in
the matter. The individual reader should lobby his system administrator, who
is paying the bills, rather than mailing "votes" as it is done currently.
Chances are that since system administrators are as lazy as all of us, they
wouldn't bother to vote unless their users urged them to doit...

One nice thing about the electronic media is that we really, truly can have a
"true democracy". That is, it shouldn't be too difficult to mail ballots to
the system administrators of all "registered" sites (of course, that
presupposes a registration mechanism!), about issues such as the moderation of
comp.sources.misc. Then when we get self-apointed "saviors" on the net, or
"net.fascists", we can just point at the ballot. Of course, that also brings
up another problem:  enforcement of edicts. What can we do about, say, a
backbone site that doesn't go along with what the rest of the net wants? (or a
peripheral site, but a peripheral site is just an easy case of this scenario).
Most sysadmins are lazy and certainly aren't going to mess with their uucp
dialing list just because some long-hairs somewhere "out there" said to..... 
so chopping them out of the net would be pretty impossible (although probably
enough sites could be re-routed to make them merely a "rib" site). The only
thing I can think of would be some sort of automated mechanism to
automatically do it for the system administrators... bringing up the
possibility of a net.fascist figuring it out and doing it himself... hmmmm...
it looks like there's no easy solution, after all!

In any event, I do think that we seriously need to look at organizing the net
and providing some means of representation for gathering the views of system
administrators.... 

  Eric Green {ihnp4,cbosgd}!killer!elg, elg@usl.CSNET