California UseNet Project Announcement

Writing charters for ca.* newsgroups

Newsgroups: ca.news.group
From: ikluft@thunder.sbay.org (Ian Kluft)
Subject: Writing charters for ca.* newsgroups
Distribution: ca
Message-ID: <Dww6Ms.A13@thunder.sbay.org>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 09:06:27 GMT

This is part of the opening discussion of Phase I of the California UseNet
Project.  For more information on the California UseNet Project, see
   http://www.sbay.org/ca/

One of the items identified so far for the inital phase of restoring
coordination to the ca.* newsgroups is to get the newsgroup charters
expanded to at least a paragraph of description each.  Other regional
newsgroups have had good results from this approach.  The purpose of this
is to make, in effect, a community agreement on what the newsgroups are
for.  Once written, they can be regularly posted, providing residents of
California with text to convince out-of-the-area or off-topic posters
(or their news admins) to respect the definitions and purposes of the
newsgroups.  (Granted, that won't be a 100% solution but a partial
solution is a better start than none at all.)

I don't expect this step to be controversial.  There should be *no*
changes to the existing newsgroups at this time.  We just want to describe
how they're used and what they are intended to contain.  They should be
inclusive of as wide a range of topics as possible with the main
restriction being that they are intended for use by Californians.

Since ca.govt-bulletins was removed when its moderator declared it defunct,
there are currently no moderated newsgroups in the ca.* hierarchy.

According to the Newsgroups file at UUNet, the following are the current
ca.* newsgroups.  Would anyone like to write up a paragraph or two
describing the ones they use?  Please do.  Post it here in ca.news.group.

For any newsgroups where the readers do not provide a description, we'll
write something as reasonable as possible, approximating the intent of
the newsgroup from its one-line description and/or its name.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ca.driving              California freeways and backroads.
ca.earthquakes          What's shakin' in California.
ca.environment          Environmental concerns in California.
ca.environment.earthquakes      Same as ca.earthquakes.
ca.forsale              Things for sale in California.
ca.general              Of general interest to readers in Calfornia only.
ca.news                 USENET status and usage in California.
ca.news.group           Existing or proposed newsgroups for 'ca' distribution.
ca.politics             Political topics of interest to California readers only.
ca.seminars             ???
ca.test                 Tests of 'ca' distribution articles.
ca.unix                 Unix discussion/help.
ca.usenet               Discussion of Usenet/news administration in California.
ca.wanted               For Sale/Wanted postings throughout California.
ca.water                Info on CA water & Internet issues.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If there are more than one description posted for any given newsgroup,
they'll be merged before any final revision.  (This includes any posted
by the volunteers, which includes myself.)  In most cases, these will
probably be fairly simple merges of lists of topics, favoring wider
on-topic descriptions over restrictive ones.
-- 
Ian Kluft  KO6YQ PP-ASEL  http://www.kluft.com/~ikluft/   sbay.org coordinator
ikluft@thunder.sbay.org (home)  ikluft@cisco.com (work)           San Jose, CA