From: peterd@cc.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
Newsgroups: comp.archives.admin
Subject: Re: Information Services Etiquette (was Re: Gopher directories)
Date: 14 Apr 92 23:18:22 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: McGill University Computing Centre

Edward Vielmetti writes
> Peter,
> 
> You are imagining a conflict where none exists.  .  .  .
> Trying to argue too strongly from the archie experience -- a  
directory
> service built on top of a longstanding internet resource -- is going  
to
> miss the sense of cooperation that has characterized how gophers work
> and how they interact with each other.

Sorry, Ed, but everyone still seems to be missing my point. I see
two separate issues being discussed here, where most people
only seem to be seeing one.

Point 1) Yes, I pointed out that we were going to be offering a 
resource discovery service based upon the archie model. And if this is 
a screwy idea in the Gopher context, and someone has a better way of  
doing things, then "Darwinian selection" of Internet services will 
prevail and whatever alernative gets deployed and works will win out. 
This is a "Good Thing" as far as I'm concerned.

Point 2) The main point I was trying to raise was that there is a world 
of difference between refusing to enter a pointer to someone's server
into your own menu and controlling who would be allowed to even offer a 
server to the Internet. If I understood him correctly, Joel was arguing 
for controlling who in effect gets to run a printing press in the 
Internet publishing world. I find this disturbing, to say the least. 
I'm surprised that no one else does.

> Some gophers are official corporate or university resources; others,  
like
> the MSEN gopher, are a place to experiment and test things out.   
Still
> others may be personal views into gopherspace, like people's  
collections
> of bookmarks. .  .  .

So you should agree that it is inappropriate to consider controlling
who actually gets to operate a Gopher server? That _was_ what
was proposed, not letting "just anyone" provide a Gopher server.
Joel, for the best of reasons, was advocating what still looks to me 
like a form of censorship through controlling who would be allowed to 
offer information. 

> .  .  . To put all of these various perspectives into a single
> top level directory "all of the gophers in the world" will no doubt  
be
> quite unwieldly.  Some amount of quality control will help.

There are two issues here. Maybe it is unwieldy and inappropriate
to offer a single directory of Gopher servers. Perhaps I have
this single big hammer and I am just wandering around trying
to find another nail to hit with it. Well, if I am wrong this time 
about the suitability of this data gathering and serving model to 
the problem at hand, then it should not be all that big a deal. Nobody 
will use the service, and life will go on.

And if you tell me that you want quality control and thus would
control the entries that make it into the MSEN Gopher and its friends,
I'd say "fine, that's your business". But it is another thing entirely 
to argue (as Joel did) that we should limit who would be allowed to
offer a server _at all_. Sorry, I see that as censorship and
I am surprised that nobody but me is having any problems with that.


> The archie approach of "one world, one archie" (except for the  
Japanese
> archie) is less reasonable for gophers.  In most cases you really  
want
> to keep lists to a few pages, more or less.  The problem is not  
resource
> discovery -- there's a zillion "resources" out there -- it's keeping
> some sensible organization to it.  

Well, this may be true now, but I could see the Gopher technology soon 
being used to build up useful collections of information all related to 
one topic. Such specialized collections would themselves be assets on 
the net, but it would be nice (especially as the number of servers 
skyrockets) to find such collections without having to browse and visit 
all of them.

Of course, this may not happen, but remember that this thread got 
started when someone complained about wanting to search for and
find individual Gopher servers, so at least somebody wants to do this
today.

A registry of services seems like a suitable way to approach this. If 
I'm wrong, well no one will use it and no one will operate it. I am not 
betting the kids' college money on this being a big money spinner
for our new company, but I do think it is a useful idea.

I still think the important issue, something that _was_ suggested and 
which no one but me seems disturbed about, is the proposal that we 
somehow control who would be allowed to offer Internet services. This
is an issue that goes beyond archie, Gopher, etc.

I think one of the empowering things about the Internet is the fact 
that it is _so_ accessible to all its users. I would hate to see
acceptance for such controls take hold, for whatever well-motivated 
concern over "quality control" issues.

Now, that's not to say that using Gopher to sent up an official
"Computing Services Help Service" is not a good idea. Controlling
which servers are entered into this particular collection of servers 
may also be a good idea. I have no trouble with this. But forbidding 
people from offering such servers on a parallel "alterGopher" track? 
Seems draconian, to me, and the intial proposal could be read as doing 
that.

I may be playing Chicken Little here, and I certainly don't want
to read more into what was originally written than was there, but
I have seen several people now post that in effect controlling who
gets to offer information to the net may be a good thing. I must
say, this surprises me, to say the least.

Still, I've registered my unease. If it doesn't bother anyone else,
well, I'll stop there. I'm still a little nervous, though.


					- peterd
Newsgroups: comp.archives.admin,alt.gopher