Dear Guy,
we had a really excellent TC6 meeting in Wroclaw. You missed an impressive event! Shortly before the meeting we still had a small hope that you would be able to make it for the meeting but .....
Your participation would have been all the more welcome and necessary since your WG 6.8 report as well as the (more than imperfect) knowledge about past and planned events would have needed much clarification.
Apparently there are no WG 6.8 meetings held since a long time. And you seem to concentrate your efforts towards towns such as Bishkek, Tashkent, ... where the organisation is risky due to political reasons; needless to say that few of the respective countries (if any) are members of IFIP or intend to join IFIP.
It appears that the (few) members of WG 6.8 are not involved in your actions which come rather spontaneous and which migth be rather business oriented. We would have to enlarge the membership list of WG 6.8 by a reasonable number of experts from North America and Europe and that we should organise strong events in those countries (PWC 05 in Colmar was a very poor example and I will shortly explain why). Otherwise TC6 will remain weak or novnisible in the very important area of wireless systems.
In particular, a lot of criticism was expressed concerning the announcement of WOCN 2006 which you distributed just before the meeting:
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Call for Papers
Third International Conference on Wireless and Optical Communications Networks WOCN 2006 http://WWW.WOCN2006.org April 11, 12 and 13, 2006 Bangalore, India Paper Submission Deadline: January 15, 2006 Publication on IEEE XploreTM and selected journals Sponsored by IEEE, IEEE Communications society
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Sponsored by IEEE (but not by IFIP)????
WOCN was always on the IFIP event list but here we don't find any mentioning of IFIP, there is no IFIP logo. Apparently no WG 6.8 knew about that activity before. Thus there is obviously a one-amn planning of WG 6.8 activities (at best).
A lot of similar problems were expressed by the TC6 delegates who were present at the meeting. It was felt that you don't aact as WG 6.8 chairman but rather for other organisations or even for your own.
Thus I should ask you some questions:
1. Do you still act as IFIP TC6 WG 6.8 chairman?
2. Do you intend to stay as chairman?
If your answer is yes then we request from you a clear roadmap of further activities and a vision for the future. It will be essential that activities will be held inmajor countries (I admit that Bangalore, India, is a "correct" place for an event).
We urge you for a clear statement about your IFIP activities. If we don't receive that message before Dec. 15, 2005 then we assume that you don't want to stay as WG 6.8 chairman and that we should initialize the procedure for finding a successor.
Best regaards Otto
cc.: TC6 delegates