🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi,
A friend forwarded the following message to me. I thought some of you may be
interested...
Cheers,
-- 
Berthe Y. Choueiry

choueiry@lia.di.epfl.ch
LIA-DI, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Ecublens
CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Voice: +41-21- 693 52 77			 Fax:   +41-21- 693 52 25



-------------- 
      AN OPPORTUNITY TO HAVE YOUR SAY ABOUT COMPUTING IN THE FUTURE

This is Gary Chapman, director of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, office 
of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.  I edit The CPSR 
Newsletter, a quarterly publication that goes to all CPSR members and 
about 400 other people, including a lot of policymakers, members of 
Congress, administration officials, etc.  

We're going to try something unusual for the next CPSR Newsletter, and 
I'm putting out a call for help.  We're going to publish a special issue
on "What the Clinton Administration Can Do For The Computing Profession
and the Public."  I'm sending out this message to ask people to send me
SHORT contributions to this issue, just brief comments about what the 
new administration can do to help support computing in the United 
States, or perhaps the world.  

Here are a few basic guidelines for these submissions:
1.  SHORT MEANS SHORT -- In order to publish as many of these as we can,
 we need to keep each contribution to about 100-150 words, max, one or 
two paragraphs.  In fact, anything longer will probably be eliminated 
out of fairness to others.

2.  YOU MUST IDENTIFY YOURSELF -- Again, briefly, with just your name 
and one line that says something about you, such as Joe Blow or Sally 
Smith, Programmer, BillyBob Corporation, or Centerville, Ohio, or 
something like that, whatever you prefer.

3.  ADDRESS ISSUES OF PUBLIC POLICY -- In order to make these 
contributions relevant to the Clinton administration, they should 
concern issues about which government can or should do something, or 
stop doing, whatever.  These include major issues such as privacy, 
access to information, computer networks like the Internet or NREN, R&D 
priorities, equitable access to computers, intellectual property, 
defense policy, risks to the public, etc.  We're not really interested 
in contributions that are self-serving, parochial, excessively arcane or
trivial, belligerently and unconstructively critical, and so on.  We 
will favor messages that discuss the intersection of computing and major
issues of concern to the public at large.

4.  PLEASE INCLUDE A WORKABLE E-MAIL ADDRESS -- In case I have to get 
back to you about the text.  We won't publish e-mail addresses, I 
promise.

5.  GET ALL CONTRIBUTIONS TO ME BY JANUARY 15, 1993.  My e-mail address 
is chapman@silver.lcs.mit.edu.

This is not limited to people in the United States, although overseas 
contributors will have to make a case for what the Clinton 
administration should do to help international computing -- the focus 
will be on U.S. government  policy.

We're going to try and get this issue into the hands of the key players 
on computing and high tech policy in the new administration.  For the 
most part we already know who those people are, and we're talking to 
them about the issues that CPSR is working on.  This newsletter will 
give them a good impression, we hope, of the concerns of the computing 
profession and people who use computer networks.  Consider this an 
opportunity for a kind of "hard copy" town hall.

Thanks for your help!  Get those messages coming!

Gary Chapman
Coordinator
The 21st Century Project
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
Cambridge, MA
chapman@silver.lcs.mit.edu