Usenix open board meeting

[Lyle McElhaney]

The open board meeting held Thursday evening at the Usenix conference was
somewhat interesting. The first hour was entirely stargate. The board's
position seemed to be that they sponsored (?right word?) the stargate
experiment, and now its up to the net to do as it willed. They feel that
the net is not their bailiwick, exactly, and that their constituency is not
congruent with the net community (its overlapping, actually).  They will
happily support peripheral projects (eg, the mapping project and stargate).
Their further role wrt the net is not definite (indeed, I heard no new
ideas about future projects).

Concerning the legal problems issue of stargate, they are cognizant of the
no-liability-broadcast vs. liable-if-moderated legal stances (indeed, they
paid for the legal research cited in ;login and reinterated by Ms.
Sullivan (?) at the conference). The consensus seems to favor the moderated
news, on the grounds that the quality would be better. As for the possibility
of suits based on the publishers role (providing Usenix was involved) their
stance is that they already publish a newsletter under those constraints,
and live with it, and besides, that's what insurance is for.

Usenix tapes - should they continue? A lot of the stuff that used to go
into the tapes is now distributed by net.sources. The amount of submissions
is declining.

Future conferences - Portland in the Summer, Denver in January, Atlanta next
Summer. The Denver conference will probably be three one-day special topic
workshops with complimentary tutorials on the other two days for each topic.
Thus, one could either get in-depth on a single topic, or 1-day state-of-
the-art on three topics. Sounds rather nice. 6 or 8 possible topics were
mentioned. Send your votes to your favorite board member.

Uniforum is to be 1 or 2 weeks later in Anaheim. Apparently they (/usr/group)
have booked all the hotels nearby, requiring Usenix, in order to pull
another Dallas, to support a ~50 miles (or more) commute. Unacceptable.
So the parting of the ways has finally occurred. Emphasis was on the fact
that there is no animosity 'tween the groups, just that they have both
grown too big to co-use a conference. Believe it or not...

(All the above is my impression of what was said; any correlation with
reality is problematical, and subject to change without notice.)

Lyle McElhaney
-- 
Lyle McElhaney
{hao, stcvax, brl-bmd, nbires, csu-cs} !denelcor!lmc