Comped scribblers the bane of conferences

[dmolnar]

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...