IMPORTANT: Serious violation of bionet.prof-society.* vote

[Foteos Macrides]

In article <1994Jun20.202407.25317 at news.yale.edu>, una at doliolum.biology.yale.edu (Una Smith) writes:
>[...]
>>Assuming that there are no further posts in violation of our
>>policies, I will abide by the outcome of the vote. ...
> 
> 	These are not "our" policies, these are David Kristofferson's
> 	dicta.  Here, David threatens to abandon them, to suit himself.
>         Note, he has *not* said he will throw out the vote (and thus
> 	keep the status quo of voting for all new newsgroups);  instead,
> 	he threatens to go against the expressed voter preference.
>[...]

	The bionet voting policy and bionetiquette concerning solicitation
of votes in other hierarchies was discussed at length in 1992, until
consensus was reached and a vote on the voting policy was taken.  That
policy and associated bionetiquette has remained in effect since then.

	Una, here's what you had to say during that discussion:
	
>From: una at BASHFUL.PHY.DUKE.EDU (Una Smith)
>Newsgroups: bionet.general
>Subject: Re: BIOSCI newsgroup creation/termination policy - LONG!
>
>For brevity, I have deleted much of what Dave Kristofferson
>wrote, except:
>[...]
>>it would be necessary to restrict the call for votes
>>to BIONEWS/bionet.announce.  Lobbying other USENET newsgroups
>>to find voters would be grounds for cancellation of the vote.
>
>Hear, hear!  It's OK to recruit *readers* to bionet groups, but
>it isn't fair to solicit votes from people who aren't sufficiently
>interested in the bionet groups to bother reading them in the
>first place.  When I see such pleas in other Usenet groups, I make
>a habit of voting NO, just to counter the meaningless, knee-jerk
>YES votes that I know are generated by such requests.  Soliciting
>votes creates a lot of noise and stuffs the ballot box, but in the
>end there are no more readers to keep the discussions going.

	BTW, we still need a more sophistocated, form-based interface for
searching the biosci.src database.

				Fote

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 Foteos Macrides           Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology
 MACRIDES at SCI.WFEB.EDU     222 Maple Avenue, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
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