Tom,

Thanks for the update.


* 2 questions: Copyright and spam issues.
* 1 technical comment: accessibility of lists.
* observations on the number of practitioners

* Spam

What position did you take on Spam considerations. I.E: once you do
have a database, do you send everyone e-mails, potyentially spaming
practitioners? I refer here to the fact that the definition of spam is
rather confused, with several versions:
- the unsolicited quality alone makes it spam, or
- its commercial content alone (possibly including solicitation for
membership), or
- its sheer number (bulk e-mails), or
- a combination of a number of the above qualities.
Perhaps your ISP is OK with your version of mail sent to all
practitioners. It may be a good idea to check with them.
If your ISP is not OK with your bulk e-mail strategy, then you can
always change your ISP for one less concerned about Spam, or more
understanding of your position.
I have to face similar concerns for my database (under construction,
both the Rolf Institute's and the Guild's lists can now update my
database on a regular basis; the search tool is on its way; stand by
for a sneak preview). My position seems more defendable than a
membership association (I am not trying to sell anything), but then
again, like I said above, not all ISPs have the same policy.

What is your spam strategy?


* Copyrights:

Did you obtain specific authorization from the list owners to
reproduce their content, or alternatively, did you find a legal reason
why you do not need such an authorization?

The spam issue doesn't prevent the tool from existing, it just makes
it hard to make it known by practitioners without sending them an
e-mail. Copyrigth concerns are really to be resolved: if the schools
do not allow reproduction of their list (either publically or
internally for mailing purposes for instance), then a way around that
may be the profile of a search engine such as Google, which is
something I am trying to remain close to.

Anyway, I do not have yet a clear answer to these concerns, perhaps
you do.


* accessibility of lists:

A number of lists are difficult to spider, because of their technical
layout.

This includes the list of KMI, which is embeded in a .swf flash file,
making it particularly hartd to decode: a special software needs to
run on the server to be able to access the text content. I spotted the
html version of the KMI list, but it does not include all KMI's
members (Europe is not included there). It would really help if KMI
made its html list complete.

Similarly, Hellerwork's list makes spidering really hard. It would
really help if Hellerwork used a consistent format...

Along the same lines, the RI's list also has some irregularities
making it hard to insure that the spider script will catch everything
correctly in the future.

These comments of course suggest that schools and associations could,
and should, reconsider the format of their lists, so that spidering
them becomes easy. This would at least allow others to take
communication where they leave it in its inefficiently exploded and
ecclecticly represented fashion, towards more comprehensive search tools.

Of course, there is something that can be offered to help technically:
to allow organizations to use the database directly, to manage their
list. In this option, schools and associations could manage their
practitioners list directly on the database. The database then uses
the information in two ways:
- to populate the larger search tool (what I have been talking about),
- to generate a practitioners list customized to the organization, so
that they can integrate their list back into their web site (with
graphics, menu, background, etc., which correspond to the
organization's site).

But this technical feature cannot possibly make up for lack of
political will to make communication more efficient.

In general, the fact that each organization uses a different format,
method, tool, and data selection to represent or locate practitioners,
etc, makes it really hard to bring any kind of consistency to our
practitioners databases. This calls for a special module to decode
each association. Such modules are not infallible, and even if they
test OK today, they may fail sometime in the future, calling for a
manual correction procedure from the begining, which requires someone
to perform, on a regular basis.

Hard, but not necessarily impossible...
Stand by for a sneak preview in a demo version soon.


* observations on the number of practitioners

I cannot yet confirm your number (4000).

Between the Guild and the Rolf Institute, an interesting phenomenon
can be observed once sorting the data to eliminate double e-mails, or
double names. A lot of records represent a significantly smaller
number of practitioners. The Rolf Institute has about 40 records which
are exact doubles of others, without even talking about various
locations for 1 practitioner, which happens a lot too, and a lot of
the records in the RI listing are also in the Guild's.

With these observations, it seems that, from the web, we will not get
close to 4000 (which first seems like a fair estimate, when looking
at just the sheer number of entries). But if there is a way to access
names which are not on the web (discontinued memberships, graduates
non-members), then perhaps 4000 is a good number.

Also, once the database is up and practitioners can create and manage
their own account, then hopefully these 'hidden' practitioners will
let themselves be known, by creating such an account (it appears that
perhaps 75% practs have e-mails and therefore hopefully access to the
Internet). The database may help bring a number of practitioners out
of the shade. Of course this could not replace an even better
solution: schools listing all their graduates, versus paying members
(and in a stable and decodable format!).

Of course, some schools would have to realize that memberships as a
condition to inlistment in their online list, simply kills
development: even if they can draw a lot of cash this year ($250,000
per year for the RI comes from memberships) , expansion is slower
because not all practitioners are foundable, and therefore, it only
takes a few years of memberships to reach a point where the lack of
development is greater than the income from meberships, and from then
on, the imbalance gets worse. In other words, schools would have to
realize that membership fees for a listing is a get-rich-quick short
term scam, versus the sound long-term approach of promoting all
graduates without financial conditions.

Between Utopia and our ridiculous reality, there may be a workable
compromise. As I noted, only the schools/organizations political will
could bring us to quasi-perfect. Technology may help taking some steps
towards these organizations, but once in place, will they use it? will
they adapt their information offer to the marketplace's demand for
data? Or will they not? You probably suspect what I may generically
think; but hey, I would love to be proven wrong.

Sincerely,

Reda



--- In Structure_Integrator@yahoogroups.com, Thomas Myers
<kinesis@p...> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I have been off-line for a while, but wanted to give an update on the
> International Association of Structural Integrators (IASI) thing.
> ...