John R. Haggis  wrote:
[...]

> Weeellll, the PIC technical group would be a far cry from ba.personals, in
> terms of justification and public merit.  But please, Ran, tell us about
> what you saw, and what you know about starting newsgroups.  Is it different
> on different branches of the tree?  I've heard alt. is very easy, while
> other branches are more difficult.

I am not Ran, but since I can answer this question I'll answer it anyway:

+ Creation of a newsgroup in alt is quite easy, but there is no guarantee
  that sites will carry it. Individual news maintainers will decide whether
  to carry the group. Some sites don't carry any alt groups.

+ Creation of a newsgroup in "the big seven" (among which sci and comp)
  is harder:
  Required is a Request For Discussion posted in the moderated newsgroup
  news.announce.newgroups, followed by at least 21 days of discussion in
  news.groups, followed by a Call For Votes in news.announce.newgroups.
  This takes at least 42 days (make it two months, with Christmas).
  Also required is a sufficient number of YES votes (roughly 100 more YES
  than no votes, and at least 2/3 YES votes).
  Are there already that many people who would even vote on the proposal?
  See the documents in news.answers (or was it news.announce.newgroups?)
  for details.

  Some questions that will have to be answered in the process is why
  the current newsgroups (like for example sci.electronics) could not
  handle the PIC related posts by using a '[PIC]' tag on all PIC-related
  posts and a reader with killfile capability, and why a mailing list would
  not be appropriate.

  If the discussion and the voting went well, then there is a fair chance
  that news maintainers will carry the new group. No guarantees though.
>
> - JohnR

I am afraid I contributed to the organizational noise here, but in the
hope that this noise will disappear.
--
Sincerely yours,

        Gertjan Akkerman ( akkerman@dutiba.twi.tudelft.nl )