San Jose and ML or newsgroup

[olaf@rcf.usc.edu (Olaf Meeuwissen)]

Mina-san,

Ah, the San Jose tournament ... KSCI  got me thoroughly confused there with
the commercials during the Nagoya basho. Saturday's broadcast turned out to
be about the tournament in San Jose a few weeks ago. It showed little sumo,
maybe ten minutes total, if that much, but an  awful lot about  the rikishi
"playing tourist". It was fairly entertaining and definitely fun to  get to
know the rikishi "off the  dohyo" a bit. Some of those guys giggle  as much
as your typical teen-age high school girl :-)

Now, some thoughts and comments about ML vs. newsgroup. I browsed around in
my copy of "Zen  and the art  of InterNet" and  got  some  interesting, but
possibly discouraging, info on how to create a new newsgroup.

If we want  to create alt.sumo,  alt.sport.sumo  or any alt. type newsgroup
there is  no  problem, although I  don't know how to actually create it (it
may  be similar  to  what I'll desribe below, though). The  disadvantage of
this type of group  is that it is more likely to  _not_  be carried by your
site than a group like rec.sport.sumo.

I  believe  that  rec.sport.sumo  is the  more appropriate  name. Sumo fits
nicely in the rec.sport  hierarchy, better than in  soc.culture, and people
will search on sumo if  they  are interested anyways. Besides, I think that
our  main interest is in the sumo, not the  fact that it is somehow related
to  Japanese culture, even though that  may have caused the interest in the
first place.

Now, to create rec.sport.sumo  one of  us (Pete?) has to post a Request For
Discussion  (RFD)  to  news.announce.newgroups  and  relevant  sumo-related
groups. This RFD has to contain a proposal for the group name and a charter
for it.  Then  this will be discussed  until  some kind of  concensus,  how
Japanese :-), is reached on the desirability, name and nature of the group.
Then it is time to Call  For Votes (CFV). This post goes to the same groups
and contains a description of the  voting procedures.  When the votes  have
been tallied, the fate of the new group becomes clear.

This procedures takes somewhere between two and four months (if things sail
smoothly). Add to that that for a  group  to be  created  it needs 100 more
valid `yes' votes than  `no' votes _and_ a  two-thirds majority, and you'll
probably  conclude, with me, that a mailing list  isn't such a  bad idea. I
doubt that we  can get that many  `yes' votes, certainly  some people  will
vote `no' and argue (correctly?) that  the volume on the group would be too
low,   that    it   belongs   in   rec.sport.martial-arts    (really?)   or
soc.culture.japan  or  alt.talk.bizarre  :-).  My guess is that we  need at
least  about 130-150 `yes' votes.  But even if  the group can be created it
will take  several months. For that period of time it is worthwhile  to set
up a real mailing list.

For a mailing  list we basically  need one account  dedicated to forwarding
incoming mail to  all of us. It doesn't  have to  do anything else.  So, on
Unix systems you'd need a .login, a .cshrc and a .forward file. Whoever has
access  to this account will  be  in  charge  of keeping the .forward  file
up-to-date and  checking the validity of  the  address  of  new subsribers.
Anyone who knows how to use an editor and mail can do that. The tricky part
is `what if things go wrong?', like bouncing mail (that will be returned to
the forwarding account  and then send  to  all of  us  and bounce again and
...). Before I start digging to figure that out I'd like to know if someone
has  a  little used  account or  can get  a second  one and is  willing  to
volunteer it. Since  I'll be losing my computer access in two months (aack,
I'd better get on  with my thesis!) it's no use volunteering one of my five
(gulp) accounts (well, two of them can't mail, so three really).

That'll be all for now, jaa mata

    ____
   / __ \ /\          ___  Olaf Meeuwissen           (e-mail: olaf@usc.edu)
  / / / // /____     / __\ Dept. of Chemistry, Univ. of Southern California
 / / / // // __ \  _/ /    ------------------------------------------------
/ /_/ // // /_/ / /  _/    These days  are precious,  and I'd  rather spend
\____//_/ \_____\ / /      them goofing around than studying.
                 /_/                                              -- Calvin