🚀 go-pugleaf

CAST collegues (fellow fishermen and women...)

I have taken the liberty of propagating to the CAST bulletin board
a copy of the latest SUEARN digest, a very long message which 
contains an important paper on the development of networking in the
ex-Soviet Union.

I felt justified in doing this as, even on a quick first reading,
I was struck by the number of research opportunities for CAST
folks opening up: the opportunity to study the development of
network use in an almost 'green fields' situation being not the least
of these.

I was also struck by the potential of linking these developments with
our recent Infoport discussions. We've been thinking of the Infoport
perhaps as a free-for-all market place (not free in the $ sense, more
in the fisticuffs sense) in which Columbus, as market "owner" would
somehow be neutral. But maybe we should think of Columbus, and OSU
in particular, giving a helping hand to some of our Russian and other
East European colleagues.  I seem to remember a lot of OSU folks had
firs hand experience of the coup and counter-coup, that the College
of Business has intentions to develop/assist with MBA programs, and so on.
Even if we 'electronically twinned' with one city, assisted them to tie
in to the Infoport, it would have a considerable impact.

I was witness (electronically) to the first steps of RELCOM, SUEARN and
GLASNET.  Some people tried to get themselves positioned as gatekeepers,
rather than facilitators of networking; others were very creative in the
use of networking to promote their own careers; some risked their lives
using networking to support the counter-coup, including Gorbachev supporters
who saw Yeltsin as dangerously volatile.  It will not be simple. Networking
with the xUSSR is different now from the recent past when you couldn't
get error-correcting protocols to work because the KGB computer that was
sampling the messages didn't reconstruct them properly.  One way in which
it is very different is the laboratory it provides in different strategies
of ownership and co-operative principle, ranging from those who seek to make
large profits to those who think free network access is the true mark of a
democratic society.  This range includes people in the academy, not just the
new entrepreneurs out to make an honest buck.  

But then, what models do they have to follow?

Tony Scott,  Art Education & ACCAD, Ohio State University

ps I left in the details of the Norway conference & the Fax gate
to the xUSSR.  I think it is significant that we should now
be thinking of Russia and Norway as "co-regional", and note the
developing use of 'faxgate' technology both here at OSU and in the xUSSR