🚀 go-pugleaf

Allison Woodruff has shown me the responses to her posting, and I
wanted to thank the dozens of people who have responded with
suggestions for musical pieces, artists, and offers to assist with the
project.

For those of you who requested additional information on Sequoia 2000,
please contact:
		 Claire Mosher 
                 557 Evans Hall 
                 University of California, Berkeley
                 Berkeley, CA 94720
		 claire@postgres.berkeley.edu


Some people were concerned that it is inappropriate for a project as
large and well-funded as Sequoia to request donations of music and art
to the project. One poster asked us to post the US postal address of
the project director.

Roth> Perhaps you should contact the executive management of this 
Roth> project to inquiry before issuing requests that in effect 
Roth> are stating a policy that Sequoia 2000 places such a high 
Roth> value on their empire that they expect artists to hand over their 
Roth> retirement funds to support it.  By the way, in the interest 
Roth> of providing input on how the music sector should be approached 
Roth> I will like to see a follow-up posting listing the head of this 
Roth> project along with their postal mailing address.

I have no objection to this request; the project director's address
is:

		 Michael Stonebraker 
                 557 Evans Hall 
                 University of California, Berkeley
                 Berkeley, CA 94720

I'm not quite sure how to respond to the objections over the request.
It's clear that many people want to donate to the Sequoia project and a
large number of people want information on Sequoia.  Project Athena was
important and useful during the 1980's and it appears that Sequoia will
be important in the 1990's. Computer companies donated the funds that
allowed Athena to succeed and they got many things back from the
project, e.g. X-windows and kerberos.  Certainly the argument can be
made that computer companies did not donate 100 million dollars to
Athena for entirely altruistic reasons. Conversely, one can argue that
it is admirable that the computer firms have combined their basic R&D
for the study of a social issue as important as global change.  Roughly
half of the Sequoia researchers are pure global change folks.  Working
with the project I've definitely had the feeling that those working on
Sequoia have their hearts in the right place.

I don't know what the motivations of the artists who want to contribute
to Sequoia are.  There are some non-altruistic reasons why musicians
would donate work to Sequoia, e.g. to give themselves exposure by
creating a music video with great computer graphics. Musicians often
have to pay to have computer graphics done for their music. Sequoia has
some of the best computer scientists in the world working on it; they
may produce some *very* nice computer graphics (Scientific MTV?). I
guess the deal here would be that the global change researchers, the
computer scientists, and the musician would get exposure, but no one
would make a direct profit from the work product.  Also, it's not
unreasonable to believe that musicians might have altrustic motives.

For whatever reason, people want to donate their work, their expertise,
and their funds to the Sequoia effort.  I'm glad for this, Sequoia is
an exciting project.


		          --Gary Darling


P.S. I'll be speaking at NCGA in Anaheim on March 11 in the Computers and the 
Environment section.  I'll give an outline of Sequoia and another project 
I have underway to allow for residential 64 kb Internet access to facilitate
telecommuting and thus reduce automotive emissions.  


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Gary Darling                 The Resources Agency
(916) 322-5236               The California Department of Water Resources
Fax: (916) 653-6077          1416 Ninth Street, P.O. Box 942836
Internet: gary@water.ca.gov  Sacramento, CA. 94236-0001
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