I would like to see netCDF information continue to be distributed as it is.
The discussions are interesting and fully pertinent to generic sharing
of data among scientists.
I think having a dedicated newsgroup that people must log into takes
it out of people's awareness, and makes them have to hunt for the information.
Overall that is more time consuming. We find within our organization
that using newsgroups and notes conferences do not get information to
people in as timely a manner, or stimulate as active of a discussion on
important technical points. The principle of "Out of sight, out of mind"
is at work when you make people hunt for information.
As far as expanding the current mailing list to include other approaches to
data sharing in addition to netCDF, I think that the people who really care
about these issues are already part of the netCDFgroup mailing list. It
could be larger. We could do more work to make it wider known, however, that
may expand the Unidata's support load.
I say, let's keep it as it is. Deleting information is much easier than
having to go hunt for it. We'll get better review the way it is.
Rich Lysakowski
