Help Needed Defining Current Net Community for NII Policy Initiative Project

I am working on a project with several other people on policy initiatives for the National Information Infrastructure (NII). Each of one of us is representing a different user community. Others are researching such communities as the telecommunications industry, K-12, Business Communities of various sizes, etc. My group is a fairly hard group to characterize - that of the current community which uses the Internet, Netnews, and other networks. This is a hard community to try and summarize information about, as it is a very broad and diverse community. I would appreciate people's opinions on how to define at least your part of the community in reference to the following topics:

These topics are all extremely broad. This was both intended and not intended. We wanted some breadth for each community to have some leeway in the definition of the topic and their stand on it. However, these are also just a limited number of categories. For example, personally I do not feel that privacy and intellectual property are the correct "characterizations" of these issues. As for the Netnews community, and ftp/gopher/web/etc openness for communication would be (in my personal opinion) a higher priority than intellectual property, and cooperation more important than privacy. However, I would like to hear from others about their thoughts on these matters.

As such, I need your help in order to properly represent any segment of the current netizens community.

Please reply publicly to this message or privately to me at hauben@cs.columbia.edu. When the project's WWW page is started, I will post the address.

Thank you,

-Michael Hauben

Return to my home page - the Netizen's Cyberpost

Michael Hauben / hauben@columbia.edu