From bill@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com Wed Mar 18 14:56:24 1992 Received: from travis.csd.harris.com by dkuug.dk via EUnet with SMTP (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA07803; Wed, 18 Mar 92 14:56:24 +0100 Received: from amber.ssd.csd.harris.com by travis.csd.harris.com (5.61/harris-5.1) id AA00103; Wed, 18 Mar 92 08:56:14 -0500 Received: by amber.ssd.csd.harris.com (5.61/CX/UX-5.0) id AA02706; Wed, 18 Mar 92 08:56:12 -0500 Date: Wed, 18 Mar 92 08:56:12 -0500 From: bill@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) Message-Id: <9203181356.AA02706@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com> To: Keith.Bierman@eng.sun.com Cc: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk In-Reply-To: Keith.Bierman@eng.sun.com's message of Tue, 17 Mar 92 13:52:16 PST <9203172152.AA24670@chiba.Eng.Sun.COM> Subject: (SC22WG5.63) Re: Future procedures X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 > Date: Tue, 17 Mar 92 13:52:16 PST > From: Keith.Bierman@eng.sun.com > ANSI rules ensure that folks *are permitted* to attend and vote. There > appears to be no attempt to ensure that it be representative (nay, the > rules favor the small over the large .... one vote per organization > .... no weight for org, nor for user base; for better or worse). If we > feel compelled to reinvent representative democracy Since when was X3J3 a representative democracy? How many users voted for *you*? It is a voluntary organization, not a set of elected representatives. My point was that many users have essentially no representation at all on X3J3, but many X3J3 members (like Keith, apparently) seem to feel it represents the entire community of Fortran users and vendors. I'd much rather that more users got involved in the standards process, but for many reasons they don't. All I'm suggesting is that we recognize that fact, and stop acting like we're the gods of Fortran who know all and see all. As for the rules favoring the small over the large, let me remind you that small organizations find it much harder to justify the expense of participating in X3J3. Just look at the current members of X3J3; a large portion of them represent very large corporations or organizations. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of smaller companies and private users out there. Who is representing them? > Seemingly simple, perhaps overly so. There is ample evidence that a > cursory reading of virtually any complex document will generally not > be sufficient for the "common reader" to comment sensibly. Ah, yes, we shouldn't give those poor, ignorant natives the right to vote, they'd just squander it. :-) Better to protect the people from themselves, right? > While there is a lot of value in kibbitzing, and I strongly endorse > making much of the process more acessible to those with good net > connectivity, I don't believe that you can do simple headcounts. We'd > all be programming OS 360 otherwise ;> No, we'd probably all be programming DOS. >>The first step is to recognize that the committee does not adequately >>represent the majority of its consumers. > This is far from clear to me. Okay, here are some facts. Using the last list of membership I can readily find (Meeting 116), there were 44 members listed. Of those, 9 represent organizations primarily involved in energy or high-energy physics research. I seriously doubt that over 1/5 of all Fortran users are involved in such activity. Moreover, another 6 members represent vendors whose principle markets target those same users. That makes over 1/3 of X3J3. Are 1/3 of all Fortran users really involved in such computing? I doubt it. Now before you flame me, I'm not saying those users shouldn't be represented. Nor am I saying that those X3J3 members represent that one market to the exclusion of all others. But their primary interest is sure to be that with which they're most familiar, which means the high-energy physics and energy-related fields get more attention in the standard than is warranted by the number of users in those fields. Okay, flame away. :-) Bill Leonard Harris Computer Systems Division 2101 W. Cypress Creek Road Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309 bill@ssd.csd.harris.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------- He that does not remember the past is doomed to forget where he parked. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------