Newsgroups: comp.org.decus
Subject: Re: EXECUTION of DECUS Standards
From: tp@mccall.com (Terry Poot)
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 16:02:50 CST
Reply-To: tp@mccall.com (Terry Poot)
Distribution: usa
Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA
Nntp-Posting-User: tp


In article <17DEC199214022742@rover.uchicago.edu>, frank@rover.uchicago.edu
(Frank - Hardware Hacker - Borger) writes:
>In article <1992Dec17.082309@mccall.com>, tp@mccall.com (Terry Poot) writes...
>>Yup. Put all those mailing lists into public conferences and/or newsgroups.
>>(Mailing lists are a lousy vehicle for conferencing anyway.) 
>
>	Agreed. That is why Notes was added to DCS. But conversely, a notes
>	or net type of conference or newsgroup is a lousy for targeted
>	communication. For that, you need electronic mail and mailing lists.

Agreed. The key point is drawing the lines in the right places. You are correct
in that I've never seen DCS, not being "leadership". Based on what I've heard
and read, though, it would seem that other "leadership" people didn't hear about
the standards activities being dropped. I infer from that that DCS isn't used to
air such decisions before they are made, at least not to the extent that it
should. And even if it were, DCS is limited to certain people, and that set of
people is certainly smaller than the set of people that have an interest in the
decision.

>	If I had to read every communication coming out of DECUS to decide
>	if it applied to me or not, any type of leadership functioning on
>	my part would cease forthwith.

Sounds like you need more conferences. Proper use of conferences and subject
lines should allow you to easily select the issues you are familiar with. My
background is news, not notes, so maybe it isn't as easy in notes, but within a
news system, such filtering is not at all difficult. My newsreader sorts
articles by subject so I can choose to read or not read all related articles
quite easily. 

>	Do you really want to pour through all the messages that tell you
>	deadline for the store representatives for submission of articles
>	to sell at spring DECUS will be such and such a date?????

No. But then I might not read a conference devoted to symposia, and probably
wouldn't read an article entitled:

Deadline for DECUS store for Spring '93 symposium

The fact that the article was there certainly wouldn't cause me any distress.

>	Agreed, there are some problems with openness. When we set up the
>	Newsletter conference on DCS, it was agreed that it was open to all.
>	We hoped we could get feedback from users, we wanted that to be the
>	place where the back-porch type of discussion was held, (versus the
>	stereotypical smoke filled room.) Regretably, not all conferences
>	that should be open are.

And the "open" ones are only open to those with DCS access.

>>And, the traffic
>>comes pre-sorted by topic (conference/newsgroup) rather than just dumped into
>>>a mailbox in chronological order.

>	Only if you have enough topics. If you look at the net conferences,
>	you rarely find one actually sorted. Let's see now, I would need alt.
>	decus.newsletters.L&T, alt.decus.newsletters.DAARC, alt.decus.news-
>	letters.finance, ... sure guys. 

Why not. How many is too many? Depending on the amount of newsletters traffic,
though, it might be sufficient to create a single newsletters group. You only
need to split them if there is enough traffic that it is a problem. Subject
lines are used to select which articles in a group to actually read. Or perhaps
*.newsletters.sig for discussion of the various sig submissions, and
*.newsletters.policy for finance, editorial policy, distribution issues, etc. A
properly fine-tuned hierarchy can successfully trade off number of groups with
the amount of traffic in each group. email can always be used to talk to a
limited number of people, but decisions made in email are by definition closed.

     (* I refuse to place them in alt, even hypothetically. :-)  )

>	Ok, lets try to summarize. (I just checked, you don't have DCS access,
>	so you really are not active in DECUS day to day running. What I feel
>	is:

Yep. My position as VMSnet network coordinator is not leadership.

>	DCS works well for messaging concerning day to day operations of DECUS,

Whether DECUS day to day management works well, because of, in spite of, or
unrelated to, DCS appears to be a contentious proposition.

>	where I have specific information that must go quickly to a key person
>	or a few people. 

I certainly didn't mean to suggest doing away with email. Just to avoid using it
as a decision making forum, away from the prying eyes of those who might care
about the decision.

>	example: Many messages go back and forth between a
>	few people charged with coming up with a commercialism policy pertinent
>	to th newsletters in particular.
>
>	Notes/etc works best for taking that commercialism policy you have just
>	sweated out and submitting it to the general populace to get their
>	reactions. (Hopefully you will get constructive criticism, in truth,
>	you will typically end up with few responses.)

Comments here and elsewhere would indicate that what really happens is a few
people sweat out the policy and then kick it upstairs to be acted on, skipping
the "Notes/etc" step. If not, I'm glad. Now all we have to do is get them to
also post it to the net and DECUServe so the rest of us can offer opinions.
(Sounds like a gateway is in order.)

Incidently, exactly why is DCS distinct from DECUServe and limited to particular
people? It sounds like the private stuff is in email anyway. It may not be true,
but the perception among at least some non-leaders is that DCS is a way of
keeping our noses out of "their" (leadership's) business.

>	The trick is to balance proper use of DCS versus notes so that I am
>	properly informed and told of major changes that will take place,
>	without being snowed under by the sheer volume of messages that
>	go flying by.

Sounds like that is not being successfully done at this point. Just how many
distinct conferences are there, anyway? Does notes make it hard to handle many
conferences or something? VMSnet has 31 groups just for discussing VMS and
related topics, and some others that we've provided a home for.

The whole point of notes and news is to help manage a large base of information.
In my estimation, news at least (don't know about notes) does a pretty good job
of this. It sounds to me as though this capability may be underutilized on DCS,
causing people to avoid it altogether.
--
Terry Poot <tp@mccall.com>                   The McCall Pattern Company
(uucp: ...!rutgers!depot!mccall!tp)          615 McCall Road
(800)255-2762, in KS (913)776-4041           Manhattan, KS 66502, USA