[235] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Other Researchers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Schlitt)
Thu Feb 28 12:29:17 1991
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 91 12:07:05 -0500
From: Dan Schlitt <dan@sci.ccny.cuny.edu>
To: craig@sics.se, jqj@duff.uoregon.edu
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
>
>Actually there is a lot of low key work going on to reach out to various
>other communities. In the past couple of years I personally know of
>several interactions with the remote sensing, ecology, botany and
>biochemical communities. NSF has been good about encouraging these
>interactions and firmly supporting researchers who try to get their
>university to provide network access for them.
>
>Craig Partridge
>(on sabbatical at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science)
I agree with Craig here, but the emphasis is on "low key". And it is
slow going because of the inherent conservatism of faculty when faced
with something new. But there is a lot of encouraging stuff going on.
One of the problems is that many faculty members have a firmly held
belief that network == BITNET. This is strongest in the non-science
areas because of the increasing use of LISTSERV mailing list by these
people. In the science areas there are additional beliefs induced
because SPAN and the highenergy physics community established DECnet
based networks. This means that the TCP/IP network community has some
education to do about the relative advantage of the Internet.
The combination of having relatively few pioneers and having those
pioneers directing their interest in several different directions
means that you do not have a unified voice from them like you do from
the "big science" communities that Marty has been refering to.
Let me suggest one place which might do the education job and develope
a voice for a broad segment of the education community. That place is
the Regionals. They are for the most part have strong participation
from educational institutions. If they directed their efforts toward
promoting educational network use and could unify the voice of these
network users then one might find something to balance the "big
science" people.
/dan
