[2356] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: The Membership of FNC Advisory Committee - Minutes Available yet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Mandelbaum)
Wed Feb 19 12:42:50 1992
To: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, cook@tmn.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 18 Feb 92 18:46:22 -0500.
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 92 12:36:40 -0500
From: Richard Mandelbaum <rma@tsar.cc.rochester.edu>
The Committee is the FNAC and its members are chosen based on their
ability to advise the FNC on policy, not their technical ability or
knowledge of networks. If I pick 20 notable scientists at random
and find that only one uses the Internet that in itself tells
me something about the real needs of the scientific community.
Screening people for advisory committees on networking based on
their knowledge of and usage of the network would tend to give one
a biased sample of the scintific community.
Anyway if you are really interested in how members of various federal
advisory committees arer chosen the FNAC is small potatoes. The
National Traffic Safety Board, charged with investigating transport
disasters such as plane crashes is a more interesting group.Even
the way members of the FCC or the Ambassadorial Corps is a more
interesting topic of discussion.
Richard Mandelbaum
____________________
Well, I'm *certainly* not going to mention anyone's name, but it is
interesting to me that less than two months ago I had to help one of
the people on that list get mail to us at the University of Pittsburgh
because this person did not know (and did not know how to find out) if
we were on the Internet. Worse yet, the request came *after* they had
received e-mail from our site.
Which makes me wonder how people (and there are certainly some highly
qualified people among the members of the FNC) get to be *chosen* for
things like the FNC.
