Dear All,
I have been following with great interest
the deliberation on “future” and “strategy”.
I have the following to share:
It appears that Digital Library is the way
to go. IEEE and ACM have established it in the research community. If we do not
have a credible library for “easy” access and sharing, the “citation”
of papers published in IFIP conferences will come down drastically. So we need
to do it. It may be worth while keeping it in the top of our agenda. Funding
sources can be Sponsorships, projects such as EU, individual subscription.
Our meetings must be more in number; but
online – Internet based. With agenda circulated ahead of time and
structured expression of opinion, we could derive more from these electronic
meetings. We have to “self-fund” through projects we already have. It
requires only broadband connection (2Mbps and above).
We must have a retrieval system for our
conferences. Please see http://netlab.cs.iitm.ernet.in
and click on IACITS 2005 (Indo-Australian Conference on IT Security) to get an
idea of what I mean. It cost us a mere 2500 USD to do it. It provides a
permanent “digital” record. I do not what it will cost when we
scale it to all conferences that we do! As we work on various aspects of
networking, it will turn out to be an excellent source of data for all that we
do. I will be happy to write projects with one or more of you to provide
funding for the same! We can also get sponsors – Indian industry and
government will support – that is the impression I got so far.
It is unclear to me as to how we generate “revenue”.
The only “value” proposition we have is “knowledge creation”
and the only “packaged product” we have is “conference”
and “conference proceedings”. Or am I missing something?
Since business plan is mentioned quite
frequently, it may be a good idea to understand the market and where “good”
raw material is available. If we locate our factory or factories near the “source”
of raw material and near the “sink’ called market, we can do very
well. In this connection, we may want to collect the following statistics:
How many papers are written by each
country?
How many are accepted in various
conferences?
What is the quality of the paper and what
is the quality of the conference (in a scale 0-1)?
Where are IFIP papers cited?
What is the impact factor, judged as
resulting in patents or products?
Where are the beneficiaries located around
the globe?
What is the country-wide distribution of
contributions in IEEE, ACM, IFIP, Private (Elsevier, Springer, etc.)?
What does UN report say about economy and growth?
What are the regions, countries mentioned
as potential?
Is the prediction correct, since the
report was published?
Can we benefit from it?
I understand that even answers to these
questions will fill a conference.
I am sure that we have WGs
interested in these aspects as well. Perhaps we can take help from them.
In a lighter vein, we get project to
understand what we need to do!
Or we run a conference to understand the
issue itself!!
Professor S V Raghavan
Department of Computer
Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of
Technology
Chennai 600036
Tel: 91 44 2257 4359
Fax: 91 44 2257 0563
Res: 91 44 2257 6359
Email: svr@cs.iitm.ernet.in
From:
ifip-tc6-bounces@lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE
[mailto:ifip-tc6-bounces@lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE] On Behalf Of raouf boutaba
Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2005
10:23 PM
To: 'Finn Arve Aagesen';
ifip-tc6@informatik.rwth-aachen.de
Subject: Re: [ifip-tc6] TC6
strategy planning
Dear Finn:
The main problems as perceived by most TC6
members are:
- IFIP TC6 has little impact worldwide
compared to other organizations
- IFIP business model (e.g., expecting
revenue from book royalties) is deemed to failure
Therefore, TC6 members decided to use the
last meeting as a brainstorming session to discuss problems and devise a
strategy for the future. Two groups were formed to discuss various aspects of
TC6 business and how to improve them. These include: (1) governance (TC and
WGs); (2) Conferences/Workshops; (3) Business Model; (4) Publications.
The set of recommendations is the result
of the brainstorming sessions and have been distributed to obtain further input
from other TC6 colleagues. One cannot expect solutions to these problems from a
short meeting. However, Ad hoc committees (composed of a Chair and few members
each) have been created to explore further the identified issues and report
back to TC6. These include a committee on Governance, a committee on publications,
business model and quality control, and a committee on digital library. I
suppose that the TC6 meeting minutes will reflect this.
In general, many believe that it is urgent
to revisit the way TC6 conducts its business in order to better serve the
community. Being small compared to other similar organizations such as IEEE and
ACM (as it is the case now for TC6 and IFIP in general) can be exploited
to better take into account the way the world is changing, for example by
providing open access quality publications.
We look forward to your and
others input.
Best regards
Raouf
-----Original Message-----
From:
ifip-tc6-bounces@lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE
[mailto:ifip-tc6-bounces@lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE] On Behalf Of Finn Arve Aagesen
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005
2:44 AM
To: raouf boutaba;
ifip-tc6@informatik.rwth-aachen.de
Cc: Finn Arve Aagesen
Subject: Re: [ifip-tc6] TC6
strategy planning