OR/MS Today - October 1998

October 1998

Old Technology, Only Better — Part II

By Michael Trick

In my last column, I talked about e-mail lists, an old technology that gets better every year with improved software and enhanced tools. There is another old technology available that has also been enhanced recently. That technology is newsgroups (or discussion areas).

The most well known newsgroup collection is Usenet. Usenet consists of thousands of different discussion areas. Trying to define Usenet is definitely a nontrivial task. The periodic post "What is Usenet" on the Usenet discussion group news.announce.newusers begins with 11 things Usenet is not ("Usenet is not an organization," "Usenet is not a democracy" and so on). Basically, Usenet is a society of people who exchange messages in a well-defined format, together with some basic formal rules and a large number of informal, community-defined rules. The formal rules define how newsgroups get created. The informal rules (which tend to be newsgroup specific) define what is appropriate behavior in the discussion.

I began reading newsgroups in the late 1980s. At the time, my interests were on the computer science fringe of operations research, and there were two or three newsgroups where people talked about things that interested me. In 1993, Mohan Sodhi (a columnist for OR/MS Today) went through the process of creating an operations research newsgroup, called sci.op-research. The level of interest in this group could be seen from the 486-12 vote in favor of its creation. Within two years of its creation, the newsgroup had an estimated 17,000 readers (there is a caution here: these statistics are very fuzzy, so much so that the developers of the software to collect the statistics have given up trying to estimate readership). This newsgroup gets from 5-10 messages a day and, unlike much of Usenet, the messages are generally of high quality with very little "spam" (off topic posts, generally to many newsgroups at once). There are other newsgroups of interest to those in INFORMS, including sci.engr.manufacturing, comp.simulation and many others.

Usenet is well over 10 years old. How has technology improved it? I think the biggest improvement has been in the archiving of past messages. For years, the same discussions would occur over and over because most people could only read the most recent week or month of postings. Some of the most recurring issues ended up in the FAQs (frequently asked [or answered] questions), a periodic posting to avoid this repetition. Still, a lot of duplication occurred. Fortunately for sci.op-research, Brian Borchers (New Mexico Tech, also an associate editor for INFORMS Online) started collecting the posts and redistributing them to the ORCS-L mailing list (mentioned last month). This continuing service allows subscribers to that list the chance to see what is going on at sci.op-research.

After a while, I started reformatting his collection for my archive of sci.op-research (http://mat.gsia.cmu.edu/group.html), which covers the period of April 1994 through January 1997 and contains 4,047 messages. With the advent of the World Wide Web, however, still more exciting things have occurred. Various companies, most notably DejaNews (http://www.dejanews.com), provide full archive and search capabilities of all newsgroups which obviates the need for individual archiving and makes the entire history of this newsgroup available. The current DejaNews archive has about 3,100 messages available for sci.op-research.

Another improvement in newsgroup technology is the availability of software to create web-based newsgroups. These discussion areas are not Usenet discussions (they are not propagated over the World Wide Web, nor is there a community that defines their creation), but they serve a similar purpose. For instance, in the year 2000, INFORMS is planning to change its conference offerings to have one major general conference each year, one practice conference, and a number of subdivision-offered specialty conferences. With such a change, INFORMS and its board naturally wants to inform the membership and get their views on how to make the change a success. At http://www.informs.org/INFORMS2000 there is a description of the proposal (along with a presentation on its reasons and effects) and the opportunity to take part in a discussion.

There are more sophisticated newsgroup packages available. One I like in particular is HyperNews (http://www.hypernews.org). We use HyperNews forums for handling discussions associated with the Student Union (http://www.informs.org/STUDENT_UNION) and Practice Online (http://www.informs.org/POL). Neither currently gets a lot of traffic, but we hope that improves. A much more active area is the private discussion area that leads up to the INFORMS Board Meetings. In this hypernews forum, all board members and committee chairs can post their reports and respond to queries on their activities. This has greatly cut down on unnecessary copying and mailing, and has made the meetings more productive.

It may be that Usenet will become less relevant as time goes on. The "near-anarchy" that defines Usenet is a great strength and also a great weakness. There is a continual battle between spammers and those who try to counter their activities (some 90 percent of all spam gets removed before it reaches the majority of Usenet). In the past, a group like INFORMS would not have the distribution channels to allow an active discussion. The Internet now provides that channel, and there is software available to support discussions. Is the membership interested in this direction?

New at INFORMS Online

Chris Hane (CAPS Logistics, chrishane@home.com) has agreed to become INFORMS Online's first Associate Editor/Practice. Chris will be looking at IOL through the eyes of a practitioner and developing new offerings and services.

Michael Trick of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, is editor of INFORMS Online.

Table of Contents

OR/MS Today Home Page

Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com