RFD: unmoderate misc.handicap

[David C Lawrence]

The following message was just posted to news.announce.newgroups, and
the submitter requested that it also be posted to your group. Since I
did not have prior approval for posting there, it is being submitted
to you separately. If you accept it for your group, please use the
headers below.

Please let me know whether any following "official" stages of this
proposal can be cross-posted directly to your group from
news.announce.newgroups, and if so whether that permission extends to
other future proposals which are relevant to the topic of your group.
If you have already contacted me about this, I am sorry for the redundancy.
My posting script does not have enough AI to know.

Thank you.

David Lawrence, moderator, news.announce.newgroups

Newsgroups: alt.support.dwarfism
From: s...@ntrs.com (Steve Bonine)
Subject: RFD: unmoderate misc.handicap
Followup-To: news.groups
Organization: .

REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
unmoderated group misc.handicap (unmoderates existing group)

This a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) concerning the change of
moderation status for misc.handicap from moderated to unmoderated.
This is not a Call For Votes (CFV); you cannot vote at this time.
Procedural details are below.

Newsgroups line:
misc.handicap Discussions of interest to persons with disabilities.

RATIONALE: misc.handicap

misc.handicap has a long history as a moderated newsgroup. (The
creation of the group predates the archive on uunet.) As moderator,
Bill McGarry built the newsgroup into a valuable resource for
dissemination of information on issues of interest to people with
disabilities.

Several months ago, entry of articles into the group became sporadic
and finally stopped completely. Since it is a moderated group,
misc.handicap has had no activity for some time. The purpose of this
RFD is to begin the process of changing the status of the group to
unmoderated so that it can return to service.

In late March, an article was posted in several Usenet groups asking
for responses concerning the need for misc.handicap. Approximately
100 positive responses were received, indicating that a need exists
for the group. Although there are a number of excellent mailing lists
covering various aspects of the subject area, there is no
general-purpose forum in Usenet.

The consensus of the feedback was that more than one group may be
needed in the future but that it is difficult to gauge what the
traffic load will be in an unmoderated misc.handicap. Traffic in the
moderated group was in the 50-100 article per week range but may not
be a good predictor for an unmoderated group. It is felt that
creating the unmoderated forum will both answer the question of
whether the traffic justifies multiple group and provide a place for
the discussion to take place on what those groups should be. Thus, at
this time, only one group is being proposed.

Another issue is the name of the group. The advantage of using the
old name is that distribution mechanisms which are currently in place
will improve the propagation of the new group. For example, there are
a number of cases in which sites forward misc.handicap to additional
sites but do not forward the rest of the misc hierarchy. Although
there was some objection to the now-outdated "handicap" term, the loss
of propagation from changing the name does not warrant the a name
change.

A final issue is the desire of some individuals to continue to have a
moderated newsgroup. At this point there is no qualified volunteer to
moderate the group. An unmoderated group will provide an indication
as to whether a moderated group is needed and a resource from which to
draft a team of moderators.

CHARTER: misc.handicap

(Note: No charter was available for the existing moderated group
since it was created before charters were archived on uunet.
Feedback received during the RFD period will be used to develop a
final charter for the CFV.)

This group provides a forum for exchange of disability-related
information.

Participants include people with disabilities and other interested
parities including educators, families, and friends.

Possible topics include:

-- Announcements of information of general interest to persons with
disabilities, including conventions, educational opportunities,
special-interest groups, developments in adaptive equipment, etc.

-- Questions regarding adaptive equipment. For example, "What is your
experience using the Super-Talker synthesizer with the Wonder-Widget
word processor?".

-- Exchange of medical options. For example, "My doctor is
recommending a Doodleblah treatment; can anyone share their
experiences?".

-- Specialty items for sale.

The following topics are discouraged:

-- Discussions which really have no relation to disability. Examples
include gun control and religion.

-- Repeated commercial advertisements. A brief announcement of new
products is appropriate, but repeated ads are not appreciated.

END CHARTER.

PROCEDURE:

This is a request for discussion, not a call for votes. In this phase
of the process, any potential problems with the proposed newsgroup
should be raised and resolved. The discussion period will continue
for a minimum of 21 days (starting from when the first RFD for this
proposal is posted to news.announce.newsgroups), after which a Call
For Votes (CFV) may be posted by a neutral vote taker if the
discussion warrants it. Please do not attempt to vote until this
happens.

All discussion of this proposal should be posted to news.groups.

This RFD attempts to comply fully with the Usenet newsgroup creation
guidelines outlined in "How to Create a New Usenet Newsgroup" and "How
to Format and Submit a New Group Proposal". Please refer to these
documents (available in news.announce.newsgroups) if you have any
questions about the process.

DISTRIBUTION:

This RFD has been posted to the following newsgroups:

news.announce.newgroups, news.groups,
alt.support.mult-sclerosis,alt.education.disabled,
alt.support.cerebral-palsy,alt.support.post-polio,
alt.support.dwarfism,alt.support.disabled.sexuality
-
Proponent: Steve Bonine <s...@ntrs.com>