From: Gabriel Fenteany [fenteany@uic.edu]
Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2005 7:50 PM

To: trygstad@trygstad.org; Michael Chapman; Gerard Manning; Gene Thursby; T.Matthew Ciolek; Hanno E. Lecher; athornhill@conbio.org; Noiret, Serge; Lynn H. Nelson; Lopez Martin, Ignacio; George Laughead Jr; Gabriel Fenteany

Cc: timbl@w3.org

Subject: Resignation from the WWW VL

I have carefully looked over the e-mails sent by the maintainers of different History WWW VL sites. I am shocked by what I have learned. I am saddened by the fact that all the History WWW VLs are leaving the VL project.

As a member of the first and only generally elected WWW VL Council - elected on Dec. 17, 1999 along with Michael Chapman, Matthew Ciolek, Bertrand Ibraham, Hanno Lecher, Gerard Manning, Lynn Nelson, Charles Petrie, Alan Thursby and Ray Trygstad - I can only say that the present VL seems to share little in spirit or practice to the VL of that time.

I am writing to say that I am hereby resigning from the WWW VL. I do not wish to be associated with an organization that: (1) no longer respects the efforts and contributions of maintainers, even those whose histories with the VL go back to its very origin; (2) does not respond to concerns raised by others, again even veteran members of the VL community; (3) does not act in complete transparency, which has always been the policy of the VL; (4) does not re-establish the traditional means of dialogue that the VL has used: the two-way, unmoderated VL-wide discussion list; (5) takes actions against individual VLs without due process, without informing the broader VL community and with opaque motives.

I will consider rejoining a WWW VL that operates in the spirit of the original one. Until that time, please remove my VL, http://www.biochemweb.org/, from the central VL catalog at http://vlib.org/. I will make the appropriate changes on my VL to distinguish it from the remnants of the once-noble
WWW VL project.

To everyone: I regret this decision and have very much enjoyed getting to know many of you. I have worked hard on behalf of the WWW VL for the last, close-to 7 years. However, since the present VL has changed so much from the original, and since I think its viability as a distributed, expert-maintained community of subject directories is very much in question, I feel I have no other alternative at this time.

Thank you and best regards,

Gabriel

Gabriel Fenteany
Assistant Professor
Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois, Chicago IL 60607
Tel: 708-386-0975