From: Tim Skirvin To: usenet-l@killfile.org Cc: Bcc: [suppressed] Subject: Re: The Future of UIUC Usenet Reply-To: tskirvin@killfile.org In-Reply-To: <20030903095712.I2288@killfile.org> [Executive summary: I've made a mailing list, usenet-l, for future discussion of this topic; no, you're not on it yet. We're going to make an RSO to hopefully control the uiuc.* hierarchy. No concrete plans have been set down for saving other hierarchies on campus yet, but there are some less concrete ones. I should have taken minutes.] Tim Skirvin writes: > So, where you guys come in: we need to get an actual proposal put > together. This first of all is going to require us to decide on what > *exactly* we're asking for. I suggest that we meet at The Office on > Monday at 6pm (it's not too smoky or loud at that hour). This meeting did happen on Monday. We had a turnout of about 20-25 people (I didn't keep exact count), and we talked about what we expected to talk about: the future of the news server on campus. Amongst the attendees were the sysadmins of the new campus news servers: Michael Kidd, "representing" news.crhc.uiuc.edu, and Chuck Thompson and David Mussulman, representing news.cs.uiuc.edu. The discussions seemed to fit into the following subject areas: o Why CITES should keep the news server, and why they can't. o How much Usenet costs to run o Saving uiuc.* - how to do it, how to ensure it will work o Keeping the rest of Usenet available to the campus Because (again) I didn't take minutes, I won't summarize the discussions here. Suffice to say that the only one of these points where anything resembling a consensus was found and a course of action was decided was #3. It was generally agreed that CITES would probably be willing to hand over uiuc.* to somebody that was interested in keeping it running; as such, that is what I will be asking for in my meeting in two weeks. The specifics may be interesting, however: we will create a Usenet-related Registered Organization, and transfer ownership to *that*. This RO will run a campus-accessible news server holding (at least) uiuc.*, and set policies regarding the hierarchy, including access control and distribution. This RO will hopefully outlive any one of us, and provide the possibility of continuity that nothing else could offer. We would need for CITES to help us advertise the service, but otherwise this service would (at least hopefully) be self-sustaining. I haven't yet created the RO (the process is on-line now), mostly because I'm looking for a good name (Posting Illini? Usenet @ UIUC? Newsgroups Organization? Suggestions are welcome.) and have to work out the officers (it will likely be me as President and Rosemary Braun as Treasurer; if students must be in both positions, then Steve Butler has volunteered to be President). I have, however, created a mailing list. If you would like to subscribe, mail usenet-l-request@killfile.org with the body 'subscribe usenet-l', and follow the instructions. It's a standard majordomo list, and anybody can subscribe. None of you are, as yet, subscribed, but I think you're all candidates to do so. As to the issue of saving Usenet as a whole: I still have some ideas to put out there, but as a group we should focus on saving uiuc.* right now. Putting up additional servers that carried the Big-8 and alt.* across campus is still on my personal to-do list, though, and I at least would gladly help anyone that wanted to work towards that (and I suspect the RO would as well). I think that's it. Here's to hoping that October 27th isn't the last time this campus sees newsgroups again. - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org) -- http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/ Skirv's Homepage < <*> http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/resume.html Skirv's Resume