Newsgroups: ba.motss

Found this and thought someone might be interested in providing
a 'motss' perspective.

Rich




Copied here FYI, from gnu.announce:
==============================================================================

       PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS WHEREVER YOU FEEL IT IS APPROPRIATE
              BUT ONLY WHERE YOU FEEL IT IS APPROPRIATE

      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
Xref: sparky ba.motss:2070 soc.motss:53882