The ASA Sections came together to provide the start-up funds to set up the World-Wide Web (WWW) server for ASA. Last August the ASA's web site came online (/), and ASA now has an official Internet presence. Now that the initial phase of developing a web site for ASA has been completed, it would be useful for members to voice what WWW services they would like to see ASA provide.
Have you ever looked at the combined membership list of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), Mathematical Association of America (MAA), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), or American Mathematics Association of Two Year Colleges (AMATYC), provided by the American Mathematical Society at http://www.ams.org/? Try it and you will quickly find the names, addresses, phone numbers, memberships, etc. of all 10 members at the University of Western Australia, for example. Would it be appropriate to provide a similar service from the combined membership directory published by the ASA? As an organization that has concerns about data access and confidentiality, should the ASA be restrictive in the information it provides about its members? Before you answer that, we encourage you to see if you can find your own phone number and address at http://www.switchboard.com or see how much information the American Economics Association provides online about its members http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/AEA/. The ACM also advertises that they will soon have available an online membership directory.
What other electronic services might you like the ASA to provide? How about the tables of contents of current ASA journals? How about employment opportunities (again, look at http://www.ams.org/committee/profession/employ.html or http://chronicle.merit.edu/.ads/.links.html or gopher://vuinfo.vanderbilt.edu/11/employment/joe before you answer).
The issues of what electronic services the ASA should supply, and at what cost are
being addressed by two ASA committees on electronic communications. The two ASA committees
are chaired by Lorraine Denby, ld@research.att.com
and Kathleen Lamborn, lambornk@neuro.ucsf.edu
. These committees will be preparing reports to present to the ASA Board of Directors. The
issues quickly become quite complicated and one could argue that it is best to allow the
respective committees to do their work and write their reports. However, not being known
as passive Sections when it comes to discussions involving technology, we felt there were
at least specific issues where our members might like to express an opinion.
The first question concerns an online membership directory. Should the ASA provide a completely search-able WWW version of the combined membership directory, and should we restrict the information we provide about members? (Our answer is that the membership directory is already available in electronic form, so making it available on the WWW is but a minimal change). There is a segment of our membership who feel that an online member directory violates corporate network security and thus feel that it should not exist or feel that only those who agree to be included should be listed. (We feel that seeking permission to put each of our 19 thousand members on the web directory is needlessly conservative and will lead to a useless directory, since many of our members will simply fail to respond to the questionnaire. We feel that giving members to chance to voice that he/she does not want to be included is more than sufficient.)
The second question is about the trade-off between potential revenue losses and services to members, and the statistical community. To be specific, should the ASA provide the current employment advertisements in an online form? Would this result in a decrease in subscriptions to Amstat News, or would it just increase general interest in membership in the ASA?
We obviously hold strong views about this, but we would like to hear from you. Send
e-mail comments to the ASA board (via Ray Waller, Executive Director of ASA ray@amstat.org , the above committees ld@research.att.com and lambornk@neuro.ucsf.edu , or to
either or us.
Mike Meyer
Department of Statistics
Carnegie Mellon University
mikem@stat.cmu.edu
Sallie Keller-McNulty
Department of Statistics
Kansas State University
sallie@stat.ksu.edu