Re: Bionet at 30 years of open science communication

[Dr Engelbert Buxbaum]

In article <mailman.143.154956...@net.bio.net>,
gilb...@net.bio.net says...
>
> Discussion of Bionet's future can proceed on the list Bionet.general,
> email: biof...@net.bio.net, and any bioscience reader may join this
> discussion. Suggestions and comments may also be emailed to
> gilbert...@gmail.com, please request anonymity if desired.

In the '90s, when traffic on Usenet was much higher than today, a very
sophisticated tree of groups was created to limit the number of messages
users had to read.
Today, I feel that one should recombine groups for example on
bionet.genome, bionet.molbio, bionet.prof-society, bionet.software and
bionet.molecules. This would limit the number of groups users have to
subscribe to and foster exchange between people working in slightly
different fields.

--
DIN EN ISO 9241-13: 9.5.3 Error messages should convey what is wrong,
what corrective actions can be taken, and the cause of the error.

[bjor...@gmail.com]

I agree with this and I would like to take the opportunity to
thank for maintaining it for so long. Perhaps Google Groups would be a good
future host for bionet?

I have found especially molbio.methds-reagnts and molbio.yeast very useful when I started as a PhD student twenty five ish years ago.

[Don Gilbert]

For maintaining Bionet mail lists, hardware is a minimal problem, almost any box, even laptop would do, but
it needs good Internet connection(s). The cost is in software engineering/ maintenance, in what are long-standard
Unix (or Linux) aspects: mail handling, spam blocking and other criminal internet abuse that any public server gets.

Legitimate usage is lowish, see the Table in PeerJ paper (doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.27523v1);
mis-use levels from spammers are high, because net.bio.net / www.bio.net
has been a public services for over 30 years, all the spammers in the world know about it.

The primary software is mail list handling, Bionet uses GNU MailMan as do many others, e.g. NCBI and EBI.

MailMan lists at Bionet http://www.bio.net/biomail/listinfo/
MailMan lists at NCBI https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/
MailMan lists at EBI http://listserver.ebi.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/

The best likely new home while have already public mailing lists, with MailMan experience.
MailMan software also has the UseNet links that keeps that portion of Bionet active.

EBI or NCBI or other bio-science groups could take on Bionet's lists, but it has effort costs
that large organizations may not see as balanced by values. For instance, Rob Harper
of EBI turned off the Bionet EMBL list a few years ago, as unproductive.

The values are the 10,000 to 15,000 bioscientists that continue to subscribe and read Bionet
groups. If any of you readers have contacts at EBI, NCBI or other bioscience group with public
mailing lists, please bring this opportunity to their notice.

A few of these groups have active, focused readership and moderators, so will manage if they
have to switch to Google Groups or other. It is the 10-20 other groups with continued use, but
no focused community or moderation staff that will likely disappear without some new group or
active person to step up to help.


- Don Gilbert

>From BF Francis Ouellette
> Hi Don,
>
> Anybody at the EBI interested in doing this? (Funny home for the GenBank newsgroup,
> but I could work with them no problem :-).
>
> I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for all of your work of the years on
> bionet … I remember it so well when I started on the internet, as a great source of
> information and knowledge for me in the 80s (days of Rob Harper) and the 90s (when
> I started the bionet.yeast). Things have sure changed over these 30 years!



>From Wolfgang Schechinger <huba...@gmx.de>

> Hi Don,
>
> could you please post estimates of the needed hardware resources for maintaining and archiving the lists and the amount of traffic to expect?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Wolfgang
>