Well, you have two approaches to this kind of problems: the Committee
Approach, and the "dangerous bozo" one (that refers to me, not to Linda
or Michael). Since I'm not very familiar with CREN management, I'll use
EARN based examples in this note, but I suppose it must be similar. If
you choose the Committee Approach, you have to make a working group to
discuss the problem and comes up with a proposal. This proposal must be
written according to the guidelines and format defined in the EARN
document EXEC106 89. You must then submit it to the EARN Network
Operations Group, which will ignore it for a couple months, after which
it will be approved by timeout and forwarded to the EARN Executive
Committee, which will probably be puzzled by the contents of the proposal
(since there is not much NETNEWS experience in the Exec). Chances are
that they will ask the Network Operations Group to come up with a paper
on the proposal, outlining its strengths and weaknesses, and explaining
why it should be accepted or refused. Anyway you're going to have to wait
a couple years to see any result, and this will probably depend on what
BITNET has decided.
The "dangerous bozo" approach, means, roughly speaking, that you just
sniff up some powdered CP source listing (or some other similarly
powerful hallucinogen :-) ) and pretend that you are living in a world
where there is no bureaucracy. You just go ahead and announce that you
are now providing this service free of charge, and that anybody wishing
to use it should contact you. If BITNIC or the EARN Office or anybody
else complains about that situation, just ask them if they'd be willing
to provide the same service themselves, and bring to their attention the
fact that, if they choose to do so, they have to make sure it is properly
coordinated with the other entities who have expressed the same desire,
given that the thing presently works and users would be very unhappy if
it stopped working for purely political reasons. Chances are that the
official bodies will then start fighting with each other over who shall
get what share of the cake, while you peacefully keep doing your work as
if nothing had happened :-) Eventually they might succeed to force you
into the Committee Approach - something that is very likely to happen if
your printer breaks and you run out of powdered CP source code :-)
Anyway you have to keep in mind that no matter how good a service you are
providing, Official Bodies will frown on it when they come to hear about
it, label it as dangerous and publish nice glossies saying nice things
like "it is wrong to rely on effort (...) which may decide to move the
network in undesirable directions" (EARN Annual report, page 4, headline:
"Users rely on EARN, EARN hires staff to guarantee services"). Actually,
your only chance of being spared is mediocrity - if nobody cares about
what you're doing, they won't pay attention to it :-)
Welcome into the boat, and good luck... :-)
Eric
|
