Help Needed Defining Current Net Community for NII Policy
Initiative Project
I am working on a project with several other people on policy
initiatives for the National Information Infrastructure (NII).
Each of one of us is representing a different user community. Others
are researching such communities as the telecommunications
industry, K-12, Business Communities of various sizes, etc. My
group is a fairly hard group to characterize - that of the
current community which uses the Internet, Netnews, and other networks.
This is a hard community to try and summarize information about,
as it is a very broad and diverse community. I would appreciate
people's opinions on how to define at least your part of the
community in reference to the following topics:
- Implementation Strategies
- Functionality (standard operating ability and/or regulations)
- Privacy
- Intellectual Property
- Equity / Access Issues
These topics are all extremely broad. This was both intended and
not intended. We wanted some breadth for each community to have
some leeway in the definition of the topic and their stand on it.
However, these are also just a limited number of categories. For
example, personally I do not feel that privacy and intellectual
property are the correct "characterizations" of these issues. As
for the Netnews community, and ftp/gopher/web/etc openness for
communication would be (in my personal opinion) a higher priority
than intellectual property, and cooperation more important than
privacy. However, I would like to hear from others about their
thoughts on these matters.
As such, I need your help in order to properly represent any
segment of the current netizens community.
Please reply publicly to this message or privately to me at
hauben@cs.columbia.edu. When the project's WWW page is started, I
will post the address.
Thank you,
-Michael Hauben
Return to my home page - the Netizen's Cyberpost
Michael Hauben / hauben@columbia.edu