Past Problems Achieving NNTP community consensus?

[Stan Barber]

Johnathan writes:
> Could someone explain the past problems in getting the NNTP community
> to come to a consensus? Why for example did the effort in 1991 to
> revise the standard fail?

In my personal opinion, the 1991 effort had a number of objectives and at the
time had to spend time inventing alot of things to meet the objectives. So,
one of the problems was the size of the task. Reaching consensus is much
easier if the size of the task is small. There was also a number of very
busy people involved in the work that had other important things going
on other than work on the revision of RFC 977. Again, the size of the task
was large relative to the collective resources available to bring to bear
on the task.

So, one of the main ideas in this group is to reduce the size of the task
to some relatively specific goals and set up a framework for moving forward
in smaller steps (instead of trying to do a large number of things at once).

Also, we now have the benefit of a number of generic technologies (like
the work on security done in other groups) that can be utilized to resolve
some of the issues that required inventing technology in 1991. 

I'd welcome any other participant in the 1991 working group to offer their
perspectives on that effort.


-- 
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Barber | URL- http://www.academ.com/academ |Opinions expressed are only mine.