Thanks for your post, Reda,

I have absolutely keine annung, aucun idee, no idea what you are
talking about with spiders and .swf designators, and so on. I will
take your advice or that of others on this, as I have no desire or
interest in the technicalities of these early iterations of the web.

I am sure we will be sending regular emails to IASI members, as this is
the most efficient way to spread news these days. Call it Spam if you
will, I hope it will be tenderloin.

The 4000 guesstimate includes IPSB, Soma, Zen Therapy, and especially
the numerous CORE graduates, as well as Rolf GSI, and Heller. But you
are probably right, it is on the high side. But it will not be long -
a few years at current rates - before there are on that order of SI
practitioners.

If we start with 1000 of those as IASI members - a realistic goal for
2003 - it will be quite a strong force for the maintenance of SI as a
profession, no matter what happens to Rolf in their never-ending
reorganizations, or to the GSI when Peter and Emmett retire, or to IPSB
and Hellerwork when Ed Maupin and Joe Heller stop teaching.

I am looking ahead to the next generation of teachers, practitioners,
writers, etc., and their interaction with the rest of the professional
and consumer world. As you are with your vision for a comprehensive
on-line directory.

Without a professional organization, no matter how much political crap
or newsletter spam it creates, Ida Rolf's work is sunk and set fair for
dissolution into the massage profession within 20-30 years. Will it
survive in some form? Of course. But I feel that a professional
organization will help it spread farther and prevent, or at least slow,
the pattern of total absorption. And there's even a chance - a small
but exciting possibility - of establishing a distinct and valid field,
as osteopaths, chiropractors, and others have done before us.

Tom M


On Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 07:00 America/New_York, redaelandaloussi
wrote:

> 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.
>> ...
>
>
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