On Saturday, August 25, 2001, at 11:51 PM, dmolnar wrote:
On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
(What might? Putting several of the main architects of competing systems like Freedom, Mojo, Morpheus, Mixmaster, etc. together in a room with plenty of blackboards, a lot of beer, and some folks like Lucky, Wei Dai, Hal Finney, and others to hash out some of the tough issues and maybe catalyze some breakthroughs. Looking at the topics, I see the likely paper contributors will be academics and corporate ladder-climbers.)
That's what targeted publicity is for -- making sure the right people see the message and show up (and maybe publish something). While I didn't make it to the 2001 Berkeley workshop, I know that some of the Freenet developers were there. ZKS was well-represented. I think the Mojo people were there, though I could be wrong. That's a start.
No, you're missing the point. The idea is not to just get _bodies_ paying their $600 or $1000 or whatever. That's just business as usual, with suits with Powerpoint on their laptops displaying pretty charts. When I said get the main architects together in a room, with lots of beer, I meant that literally. I didn't mean a presentation at the Airport Hilton or wherever. I meant an intense brain-storming session. The beer to lubricate the "bullshits!" and "here's a better way"s. Instead, you're just describing a "that's a start" scenario which is actually just a snooze-a-thon.
Then once everyone's there, the rest is a matter of (non)scheduling and beer ordering. (well, and Kahlua maybe).
So what I should do now, I guess, is contact the Morpheus team and convince them to come. maybe submit something if they feel like it.
Little point in them just presenting a set of dry slides on what Morpheus is intended to do, blah blah blah. This is what is missing from so many conferences: pizazz! Controversy, yelling, bullshit claims being denounced. (I'm not saying the Morpheus or Freenet or Mojo people are making bullshit claims, but it's clear that _some_ of the P2P/crypto players JUST DON'T GET IT.) Rooms filled with comped (and bored) journalists, suits giving summaries of product plans, spooks from Washington outlining policy initiatives. Fuck that noise. --Tim May