From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Wed Oct 06 1999 - 17:32:03 CDT
Or maybe I should ask: are we going anywhere?
After that Charles released Chapter six, there was a great lull,
until Russ came back to his Usefor mailbox, and caught up. That
appeared to have sparked a few more to eventually arrive with
their comments.
But I have an uneasy feeling that the last weeks we have made very
little progress, but we are on the verge of making regress. Things
that I at least thought there was a consensus on since years back
is being questioned, for instance UTF-8 in Newsgroups.
Since this is an open forum, everyone may join in and share his
view. While very democratic in a way, it is also very ineffecient.
We will never arrive at anything this way.
I don't have any other experience of this kind of work, but in my
opinion, in the end there needs to be a smaller group that makes
the big decisions and says this is the way it will be. Then the rest
of us may comment to improve details, pointing out inconsistencies
etc.
That doesn't mean to say that this list should be closed down, but
rather that the chairman should set a frame within which we are to
keep the discussions. As it is now, Charles spends quite some time
answering messages which in my opinion does not address issues
which are open at this time. It would be much better that he spent
his time revising Chapter 6, and most of all make Chapter 7 ready
for discussion.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se