On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 03:02:54PM +1200, Juha Saarinen said:
On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Simon Blake wrote:
No. What I suggested was that he pick a few of the current members that he knows meets some basic defn of NZ network operator, and seed the list with them. Then, the list as a whole can choose who else joins. All I'm asking Don to do is seed an initial list, and if he misses anybody who is a legit operator then they'll be known to others on the list, and be (re)instated as members. I certainly don't expect any one person to be the sole arbiter of what constituted a network operator, but I'd expect the hive mind to have a fairly good idea.
It's hard to see how that would work in an objective fashion. The members chosen to vet those wanting to join would have rather a lot of power, and power tends to get abused.
I'm picking that Don could blast through the membership and pick 50-100 email addresses that he knows are with operators/ISP's/whatever. Then when a prospect applies, it gets notified to the list, and unless anybody squawks on the list, they get put on.
Let's take a purely hypothetical example, where the chosen few decide not to let someone join the list. It could be that the person's with a company that competes against one or more of those that the list membership electors belong to.
How would that go down?
Hypothetically, how do you know it's not happening now? Answer, you're reliant on the impeccable good name list admin and his employer. Why shouldn't you continue to rely upon that? I'm suggesting that a list member would have to make a fairly compelling case to preclude somebody joining. Otherwise, your request to join will proceed as usual, with just some delay as it gets rubber stamped through the list membership.
How is how NANOG operates relevant? It gets a lot more traffic - the effect on the s/n ratio of the occasional off-topic outburst is minimal, on NZNOG it's significant. If NZNOG got 50-100 posts a day, then there probably wouldn't be a problem. But it doesn't.
I don't think that a closed list would be of any use should ISP staff decide to sabotage the s/n ratio.
So we shouldn't try to fix the s/n ratio, because we might fail?
To whom? Why do we care? Is this list here to set an example, or to grease the operation of the NO community?
Well, if you want to "grease the operation" of a chosen few and exclude others, then no, you shouldn't care.
It just seems to go against the whole Internet spirit, what you're proposing.
I'm proposing a meritocracy. It's entirely in keeping with the Internet spirit. Cheers Si