On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
The hard part is getting beyond the canned speeches. For one thing, these people (the SF writers especially!) are used to people running up to them at SF conferences babbling to them about some story idea, so they "put their shields up."
I suspect I'm guilty of doing this. Not just at SF conferences. (Actually, I've been to too few SF conferences.)
This is one of the main reasons I favor "relaxicons." In SF circles, these are, as you probably know, small cons with very few scheduled
I'm just learning. I missed out on most of this "growing up," first being out of the country and then off in New Hampshire. Something to fix soon. Especially since you can meet interesting people at cons. (The con I mentioned, by the way, is http://www.vericon.org/ in case anyone's wondering. ) [on the PET 2002 workshop]
I'm skeptical. I haven't looked in detail at this one, but the one Choate forwarded twice to the list was filled with corporate folks on the committees. (Some of whom used to be list subscribers. Fine folks, I'm sure, but now it's a corporate task for them to on committees.)
I think that all three refer to the same workshop. I'm not sure I understand this comment, though. Do you think that the committee members are doing it solely because it's a "corporate task" which they have been ordered to do? or that they've lost interest in the research now that it is a "corporate task" to be on the program committee? What exactly is the problem with "corporate folks"? I can't claim to speak for the committee members. From what I know of the co-chairs, however, they are not doing this simply because it is a "corporate task." Both of them have been interested in this area for as long as I've known them. As far as I can tell, their interest is genuine. Now, it *is* being run as a straight-up academic workshop, with Springer-Verlag proceedings, refereed papers, and that whole nine yards. This has certain disadvantages. Long lead times between genesis of an idea and publication (not to *mention* implementation), for one. Arguably too much emphasis on theory and citations rather than just "cypherpunks write code," for another. You can go after it on those grounds (and we can argue about that for another four or five messages if you want), but that seems to be distinct from talking about "corporate folks" on the program committee -- have I missed something? It's my hope that workshops like this will help attract smart people to work on the problems in remailers, implementing digital cash, and other fun Cypherpunkish topics. People who've never even heard of "Cypherpunks," and who would otherwise go off and do number theory or something else.
I have another rant in mind, a rant about "affiliations." I'll just play the script and you can figure out what the rant is about:
[script and rant skipped] When my family lived in Saudi Arabia, we had our passports covered with a sticker which identified which company we were from. No foreigners in the country without a sponsor. The rant about "affiliations" reminds me very much of that...