If the World Wide Web is the downtown business district of the Internet, the place where companies establish their corporate presence and agencies create their online headquarters, then Usenet is the speakeasy district on the outskirts of town, the kind of place that you would have to be a local to know it even existed. Many people who have come online in recent years, including a large number of federal employees, have never ventured to Usenet. An entrepreneurial group of feds and private sector volunteers is trying to change that.
Usenet discussions occur on almost any topic imaginable, from Rush Limbaugh to biochemistry. People post messages to discussion areas called "newsgroups." The newsgroups are organized by topic; alt.books.stephen-king is for Stephen King fans, rec.antiques.marketplace is a place to buy and sell antiques, soc.culture.hongkong is for discussions on Hong Kong.
More than 15,000 newsgroups are currently in operation, and people post a mass of messages equivalent to 800 four-hundred-page novels every day to them. Usenet has no governing body. Like a neighborhood of underground speakeasies, each newsgroup sets its own rules.
A group of public and private sector Usenet enthusiasts have been toiling for two years to create a set of newsgroups for U.S. government agencies and, eventually, foreign agencies. They call their effort the International GovNews Project. It is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and FinanceNet, an Internet-based service for government financial management officials.
GovNews got a boost after Vice President Al Gore endorsed it in November 1995. It opened for business this spring, with an intial set of 200 newsgroups, including gov.topic.admin.privatization and gov.topic.info.systems.year2000. A host of agencies are now posting documents to GovNews, including the departments of Defense, Interior, Justice and Housing and Urban Development. While some of the newsgroups allow discussion, most are limited to official documents, including press releases, requests for proposals and general announcements.
That has led some Usenet users to question why the government has chosen to set up shop in a place accustomed to unfettered discussion among people across the globe.
"Why should the majority of [government] newsgroups that aren't for discussion be on Usenet at all?" one user asked. Another wrote: "The challenge to us all is to have a [government newsgroup] hierarchy based on the Usenet model, not to remodel Usenet to fit the old outmoded government model."
B. Preston Rich, executive director of FinanceNet and a key player in the creation of GovNews, says the criticism is misguided.
"Many of the existing newsgroups are already set up for both information dissemination and discussion, and many are discussion only. Discussions just historically take a little longer to develop," Rich says.
The government newsgroups will be monitored for commercial messages, which has also stirred debate.
"Unfortunately, moderation of government newsgroups is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario," Rich acknowledges.
A larger concern for the government's presence on Usenet is whether people will actually use the newsgroups to get information. Very few agencies currently plan to offer their employees access to Usenet, with its cornucopia of diversionary areas (like alt.comics.dilbert).
Rich says the project's designers expect "that it will be the simple demand from the public use of GovNews that will eventually force governments to take a more proactive stance in disseminating information more widely and freely via GovNews on Usenet."
In the meantime, FinanceNet has created a World Wide Web site (www.govnews.org) that links to GovNews, enabling employees to read and post to the newsgroups via their Web browsers.
The United Kingdom, Canada and Australia have signed on to participate in GovNews. And Vice President Gore sees a future for the government newsgroups, despite Usenet's anarachical nature.
"This exciting project shows much promise in opening access to government information worldwide and represents an excellent example of important technological progress that can stem from global public/private cooperation," said Gore in June.
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