[9440] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Aikens last (but long) posting/comments on ISOC and related issues
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Partridge)
Wed Jan 5 12:21:40 1994
To: Craig.A.Finseth-1@umn.edu
Cc: ietf@ietf.cnri.reston.va.us, com-priv@psi.com,
In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 05 Jan 94 08:07:35 -0600.
From: Craig Partridge <craig@aland.bbn.com>
Date: Wed, 05 Jan 94 09:19:19 -0800
> Personally, I think it more useful to ask "what do we need
> from the Internet Society" and work from this list
> forward, rather than say "this is the list of things
> professional societies do" and work backwards from that.
...
I agree. Here is a list of things that I would rather see the
Internet Society _not_ get involved in:
* group health plans
* "insignia" credit cards
* local chapters
* and, in general, anything else that tends to fill up my US mail mailbox
On this note, I'd discourage ISOC from launching a bunch of new technical
networking journals. I've seen the circulation figures for a lot of the
journals and there's reason to believe that readers and libraries are having
trouble affording all those out there now, and so adding new journals is, in
many cases, a zero sum game (some other worthwhile journal may get nailed and
readerships fragmented).
A further point on this axis is that the number of high quality papers on
networking (at least papers on technical topics -- mgmt, admin, and social
issues need more attention) has not increased sharply in the past few years.
So there's also a zero sum game competing for top notch papers.
Craig
[and so you know all the conflicts of interest in this note :-)]
Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Network Magazine
member of steering committee of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
member editorial board of the Journal of High Speed Networks
past Editor-in-Chief, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
