🚀 go-pugleaf

This article is from well!mandel@hplabs.HP.COM (Thomas F. Mandel)
 and was received on  Tue Nov  4 21:47:20 1986
 
Regarding information consultants, it seems to me that at the moment it's
useful to make some distinctions about the setting in which information
consulting occurs.  On the Well -- a large (3500+ user), Picospan/Unix-
based regional computer conferencing system in the San Francisco
Bay Area -- there is an enormous amount of ad hoc information consulting.
Some of this is very focused, e.g., what is a good printer for doing such
and such work with an IBM PC.  Some of it waxes and wanes between poles
of bantering and "serious" exchanges of information, e.g., in the
Sexuality conference on the Well, conversation may go along for a while
about this or that sexual issue, then focus in quickly on hard data, and
then go back to bantering.  Sometimes specific new topics emerge briefly
to cover particular topics, e.g., a recent conference devoted to some
issues of concern to the Office of Technology Assessment, and then vanish.
(In such conferences, there is fairly high quality of information
consulting.)  In some settings, hosts or moderators play a large role,
in others, they do not.

On the other hand, I participate (as a sort of information consultant)
in a private Notepad conference, in which my client has a preference for
hard, useful information to answer questions -- some of the time.  Other
times, at least until something really "important" comes up, the
participants toss out new ideas about whatever they they might be interesting.

What I'm trying to say, rather inelegantly I'm afraid, is that the
context of information consulting is quite varied and is a major factor
in trying to discuss the roles, responsibilities, ethics, and whatever
of information consulting.

Tom Mandel         mandel@sri-kl.arpa    or   hplabs!well!mandel