🚀 go-pugleaf

Request for Comments:

Position:  I believe it's time (and long overdue) for the ACM to design
           a membership application that includes space(s) for e-mail
           addresses.

This is an area where the ACM can actually lead since few professional
organizations that I'm affiliated with collect this information for
their members.  The IEEE Computer Society does not.  The American
Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied
Mathematics (SIAM) do, but the Mathematics Association of America (MAA)
does not.

Last year, I made the MAA aware of the fact that the Combined Membership
List of the AMS, SIAM, and MAA contained the e-mail addresses of members
only if they belonged to AMS or SIAM.  The MAA had received some e-mail
addresses (including mine), but there was no place in format of the tape
sent to AMS to include this information.  They are aware of this deficiency,
and promised to remedy it, but to date there is no space on the appliation
to encourage members to supply these addresses.

This may be a membership editor's nightmare, but isn't this why we have
computers!  BITNET addresses are generally no longer than 8 characters,
and Internet addresses can be written in numeric form, aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd,
instead of characters to put an upper bound on field size.  From my
limited experience, I don't know if uucp addresses have an upper bound!!

If we want to encourage communication among professionals belonging to the
ACM, in particular, and all professionals in general, then the ACM should
be collecting this information and making it available via a name server
or a membership list (combined with IEEE CS?).

Positive and constructive comments invited.   Thank you.
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|  James A. Schaefer            Internet:  FacSchaefer @ RIC.edu       |
|  Math & Computer Science      BitNet:    JAS @ RICvm                 |
|  Rhode Island College         Phone:     (401) 456-9758              |
|  Providence, RI 02908-1991                                           |
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