Proposed message

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

Just to make it all specific, here is the message that I propose sending
to Professor Ida sometime soon.  Let me know if you disagree with this
action, or if you have any amendments.  After a few days, I will take
silence as agreement.

I'm not sure who the message should be signed by.  I'm happy enough to
do this as "Scott Fahlman, on behalf of the Common Lisp Steering and
Technical Committess", but it's more of a steering-type function.

-- Scott

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Dear Professor Ida:

Now that we have reliable network communications with Japan, the Common
Lisp group in the U.S. would very much like to encourage Japanese
participation in our efforts to clarify and standardize the Common Lisp
specification.  The members of the Technical and Steering committess
have been discussing for some time how we might include our Japanese
counterparts in the decision-making process.  After discussing the
matter with several Japanese researchers, we believe that the following
model may be the best one to follow:

1. The language design discussions will take place on the public Common
Lisp mailing list.  We invite any individual in Japan who is interested
in these issues to follow the discussion on this list and to contribute
to it.  We believe that the technical barriers to such participation
have now been eliminated, at least for people with access to Junet or
CSNet.  Our discussions are in English, so unless some sort of
translation can be arranged, only English-speaking researchers will be
able to participate directly.

2. It appears that your JEIDA committee on Common Lisp is coordinating
much of the Common Lisp activity in Japan.  This should continue to be
the focus for the Japanese Common Lisp community.  We will try to
maintain close communications with your committee in the future,
probably via netmail to you and other members.

3.  For the purpose of formal liaison between our group and yours, we
would like to invite the JEIDA committee to select one person who will
be a member of our Steering Committee and one person who will be a
member of our Technical Committee.  (One person can fill both posts, if
you like.)  These members will be invited to any face-to-face committee
meetings we might have, but we expect these to be rare events.  We
believe that the Japanese members would be able to participate in
almost all committee decisions, even if he is unable to attend some
meetings in the U.S.

Does this seem like a reasonable plan to you?  Are there important
segments of the Japanese Common Lisp community who would not be
represented under this plan?  Do you have any other suggestions on how
we might handle this?

If you agree with this plan, we will announce it on the Common-Lisp
mailing list, which many Japanese researchers will see.

Best regards,

Scott Fahlman
(on behalf of the Common Lisp Technical and Steering Committees)