From: bhilden@bigriver.Eng.Sun.COM (Bruce Hildenbrand)
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles
Subject: Bruce's History Lesson and Thoughts on the Reorganization
Date: 14 Aug 1992 08:45:21 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: bigriver

The announcement of the reorganization of rec.bicycles has caused
a bit of a stir, as one of the co-conspirators, I would like to
give those that are interested some insight into how this thing
actually happened.

First off, I would like to thank everyone who voted.  This is a
democratic process and everyone should be given a chance to vote.
For those who voted yes, thank you for your support.  For those
that voted no, I respect your right to disagree and hope that
since the reorganization passed that you will not be dismayed
and that you will continue to read and post on the new newsgroups.

The whole process for the reorganization started over 4 months
ago when I mailed Les and asked if he would like to help propose
a reorganization of "rec.bicycles".  At that time, the newsgroup
was averaging close to 200 articles a day, a load that in my
opinion was just too large for a single newsgroup.  Of course,
this was just my own personal feeling, I think the vote confirms
that others had a similar feeling.

Anyway, Les agreed to be my partner in crime(so to speak) and
as his usual self, he quietly took over all the major responsibilities
which was a great relief to me!  We began by me proposing 
3 or 4 newsgroups and Les sending back his ideas and me sending
back my ideas such that for about two weeks we probably hashed
out 4-6 proposals a day.  At this time we also solicited the input
from "rec.bicycle" netters off the net(we did not want to propose
anything until we had something that looked OK) and in about 3
weeks time we had our original proposal.

In accordance with the guidelines for reorganizing newsgroups
we put our proposal in the public spotlight.  The response
was overwhelming.  A lot of good suggestions were made and
we modified our original proposal and sent it back out to
the public.  Another round of re-hashing took place and the
final proposal was developed, which was ultimately approved
by the recent voting..

I can't speak of the efforts other netters put into critiquing
our proposal, but Les and I spent some long hours trying to
get it right.  That meant creating newsgroups that seemed
to be a good division of traffic that were broad enough in
focus but unique enough to keep cross posting to a minimum.
Les did some profiling, figuring out where the current traffic
in "rec.bicycles" would fall into our proposed new newsgroups
to see if we were sort of on the right track, it looked like
we were.

Along those lines, I would like to address at this time the
concerns expressed by some avid mountain bikers.  We gave
a lot of thought as to how to incorporate both road biking
and mountain biking into the new newsgroups.  For some
reason, several netters feel that we have slighted mountain
biking.  I assure you that this is not the case. "rec.bicycles"
means all bicycles!

In my discussions with Les, it became apparent that there were
a number of issues in the "rec.bicycles" domain that covered both
road and mountain biking.  We felt it would be better to have
a "rec.bicycles.racing" (rather than "rec.bicycles.mtb.racing"
and "rec.bicycles.road.racing") that would include racing information
for all types of bicycles.  If you had a group for each, where would
you put the results of the Durango Iron Horse Classic for example,
which has both on-road and off-road segments.  More than likely the
results would be cross posted.

We wanted to avoid cross posting at all costs, I feel if you thought
a minute you could find an example, like the one above, that could
cause a cross post for all the proposed newsgroups if we had made some
sort of a split between "road" and "mtb" interests.

Creating a generic "rec.bicycles.mtb" would have been the worst of
all possibilities, it would have created "cross-post heaven".  I
did not feel that there would be any issues discussed in this
newsgroup that would not have been appropriate for one of the
other new newsgroups.  It appears that the majority of the voters
felt the same way.

Anyway, I hope that mountain bikers do not feel slighted, it was not
our intention and I do not see anywhere in the proposed newsgroups
or their explanations that there is any basis for this claim.

We did not say anything explicity about road bikes in any of the new
newsgroups and you don't see any road bikers feeling that they were
slighted, there is enough room in all the newsgroups for everybody,
regardless of the bike you ride(and some of us ride both!)

I would like to address a couple more issues.  First, this is the
first time in the history of "rec.bicycles" that an official call
for votes has been proposed.  There was a lot of talk about it
over the past few years, but nothing official has ever been
done till now.  Given the amount of work that was required to
make it happen it is not too hard to understand why.

I sincerely hope that everyone can accept this reorganization and
that they will go on reading and posting as they did before.

Best of luck to everyone and thanks to all those who offered suggestions
and took part in the voting.  And a special thanks to Les, who has been
out of the Corporate world long enough that he let me do a minimum of
work for maximum credit(hey, I'm learning!).

Bruce
bruce.hildenbrand@eng.sun.com
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles