Miss Scarlet, we seem to be talking at cross purposes slightly. I understand the convention that you want to adopt. If we do that we essentially dispense with the current categories and each question that currently relates to a specific theme (i.e. keyword) becomes a category in it's own right. So, rather than "Products/Services" (or sub-divisions such as "Forensic", "Genealogy", "Paternity", "Genotyping", "Pharmacogenomics", etc.) we have "categories" like "DNAWitness", "ABD", "Statnome", Ovanome, etc. (which are essentially sub-sub-divisions) each of which has a new number.
Now a couple of points. The existing categories were used to try to make it easy and intuitive to locate topics. Merely giving a "category" such as "Statnome" a number (such as 27) does not per se achieve that objective. I could understand a convention that used the keywords themselves which would achieve this objective. This is what I was trying to intimate with my previous example. In your scheme you can add new questions to existing "categories" (using a,b,c, etc.); however if you have a new "category" you cannot add it to the list next to existing "categories" which it relates to without undertaking the renumbering exercise which we are trying to avoid. It would have to be appended to the end of the list, which means you lose the ability to organize the list by subject. In total I suspect we will end up with something like a hundred questions - even allowing for decomposing existing "multi-part" questions as per Robert's example. Looking at the current list you will end up with a lot of questions with the format "<number>.a" - because a lot of the questions are not multi-part. I am not sure this makes things clearer. Do you see what I am getting at?
I can certainly see an argument for precising some of the more verbose questions so that they are easier to understand. Some of Frog's questions perhaps fall into this category, although I perfectly understand why he has been as specific as he has with his questions - especially those that are dealing with complex issues such as the Orchid option agreement.
I would be interested in Frog's and other's views on this. I am perfectly happy to do whatever you like with the list (short of providing multiple choice answers to questions for the company's benefit) but we should not lose sight of the fact that the overall intent is to quickly agree a list of questions to forward to the company so that there is shareholder input to the pending newsletter and meeting. We should therefore perhaps not become too concerned with "format" rather than "content".
Regards
Ming
AI
