Scheme pre-R6RS Workshop at ICFP - Call for Participation

[Kent Pitman <kmp@harlequin.com>]

   Date: Mon, 25 May 1998 12:32:04 -0400
   From: Richard Kelsey <kelsey@research.nj.nec.com>
   ...
   As long as no votes are planned or group decisions are made, I don't
   see any reason to make the meeting official or to exclude anyone.

I didn't propose making the meeting official (though I do seriously
worry that it will exhaust the limited travel budget of some
participants and work against having an official meeting).  Nor did I
propose excluding anyone.

What really rubbed me wrong was the notion that "proposals were being
accepted at the meeting".  You are the editor of the spec; along with
that comes certain responsibilities, and one is to recognize that when
your name is juxtaposed with a call for proposals, you cannot assume
it will be neutrally interpreted as "something people can do
anywhere".  If my company (or anyone's) held an event and said it was
a place to accept such proposals, I think some people would make an
extra effort to attend, failing to understand that this was not a
criterion for acceptance.  As such, I really am mostly bugged that
it's false advertising--the kind of weird false advertising that
happens when you say "Attendees will be entitled to a tax refund if
they paid too much tax this year" or "You may have already won".
These are true statements, but meaningless.  And yet by stating them,
youcan't assume the intent is neutral.  The context is a call for
papers and a motivation to attend.  If you think this is an entirely
content-neutral statement and will not affect people's willingness to
attend, then it doesn't belong there, right?  If you think it was intended
to persuade people to attend, then I urge you to think deeply about
the exact way in which it's doing that--by making people feel (falsely?)
that they might miss out for not attending.