Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ukma!david
From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack)
Newsgroups: news.misc,news.admin
Subject: Awards of Arms and Usenet
Message-ID: <7782@g.ms.uky.edu>
Date: Fri, 27-Nov-87 00:52:26 EST
Article-I.D.: g.7782
Posted: Fri Nov 27 00:52:26 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 29-Nov-87 18:43:51 EST
Organization: U of Ky, Math. Sciences, Lexington KY
Lines: 90
Xref: mnetor news.misc:1151 news.admin:1439

There's been something bubbling around in my head for the last couple
of weeks.  That is, what we (we being the people who make up this
entity known as Usenet) do for the valued members of the community.

I'm a member of three other largely volunteer-run organizations.  These
are Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), Assoc for Computing
Machinery (ACM), and DEC Users Society (DECUS).  I haven't paid any
attention to DECUS for a few years, so I don't know if it's true for
them, but both SCA and ACM have various ways of giving honor and
recognition to their members who have gone above and beyond the call of
duty to support the organization.  In SCA, there is a whole slew of
awards, starting with the Award of Arms.  In the ACM there is also a
large number of awards, starting with the Certificate of Recognition.

What got me thinking was a couple of weeks ago at the East-Central
Regional Programming Contest (BTW, our teams came in 4th and 5th!), and
the awards banquet afterwards.  Amongst my irritation that this years
awards banquet did not include the "booby prizes" I'd come to expect at
Programming Contest ceremonies, I noticed a very strong similarity
between this awards banquet and the "Court"'s which are held at SCA
events.  Especially when it came time to give the Certificate of
Appreciation to the professor who had run the show.




So much for laying the ground for what I want to say.


Something which has been happening for as long as I've been a member
of this community (around 3 years now) is that there have been people
who were active participants, did valuable organizational work, made
various tough decisions, organized versions of the software and made
bugfixes, and so forth and so on.  One thing which has happened fairly
often is that these people tend to get burned out, they do all this work
and don't get appreciated.  Sometimes they even get nothing but abuse
and grief because of the work they do for the community.  And yet,
often it is this very work which has keep the community functioning!

What sort of chaos would we have now if Spaf weren't keeping a more-or-less
official list of newsgroups, and posting the shell script which helps
make sure that people are more-or-less in line with everyone else??

What sort of chaos would there be if the Usenet Project weren't running?

And there's others which I'm too tired to think of at the moment.

To cite a recent example, where has Dave Taylor gone?  And Brian Reid
has also gotten sort-of pissed at the net -- tho I suppose that has
cooled somewhat.  Going farther back, there are other people whose
names are just dim memories.

I would like to propose that the Usenet community somehow award these
people regularly, in some way.  But I have no idea what to do.  But not
only that, there is no official superstructure within the community to
do the work of finding people to reward and actually do the rewarding.
Usenix is the closest thing to official superstructure, sort of, but
not only do they not want to claim Usenet, but I doubt if most members
of the community even know of Usenix's existance.

Come to think of it, this network is growing beyond the confines of
necessarily being Unix based with UUCP as it's primary transport
mechanism.  (If this site is anywhere near average that is ... we have
3 full newsfeeds using NNTP over the Internet, give out 2 full feeds
over BITNET to an IBM mainframe and a Vax/VMS VaxCluster, plus one full
and 2 or 3 partial feeds over UUCP).  Any solution would have to recognize
the influence of the non Unix world on our community.

What are we to do?  One thing that's bothering me is something which is
repeated a number of times in the _Knowne_World_Handbook_ (a
publication of the SCA aimed at giving a broad overview of what SCA is
and how it functions and how to start yourself in SCA).  That is, one
of the absolutes that SCA sees is, since it's run by volunteers, that
the people who do extra amounts of work be rewarded ... so that those
people who do the extra work feel good for having done it, but also so
that people coming in will see something to gain for putting in extra
work to keep things going.  That is, more than the "altruistic" rewards
of seeing something which you've helped build to prosper.

We can probably continue to muddle along as we have been doing for
a lot longer than I've been on the net.  On the other hand we tend
to lose our best people over time.  This is something that we, as
a community, probably can't afford to continue doing for very long.

On the other hand I have no suggestions which I can make.
-- 
<---- David Herron -- Resident E-Mail Hack     
<---- or:                {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<---- "The market doesn't drop hundreds of points on a normal day..." --
<---- 		Fidelity Investments Corporation