[sdpd] Re: SPDP

[Armel Le Bail <armel...@fluo.univ-lemans.fr>]

A friend asked me :

>who takes care of SPDP group ?

A quite good question. I am tempted to reply >260 subscribers.

But he is right, the fact is that most VIP in crystallography are
simply not engaged in any of the Internet activities (I mean
productivity, not simply allowing congress abstracts to be seen,
though this is a considerable action yet, not realized at EPDIC-7).

Almost none of the guys at the command of EPDIC-7, or piloting ECM
or IUCr congress, and specialists of powder diffraction are subscribers of
the Rietveld Mailing list nor of the SDPD mailing list. Your almost
never see a word from them outside of the regular circuit.

Explaining that is different from explaining the "silent majority".
The question concerns a silent powerful minority.

For them, I would say that they already have what they think to
be the real power on the powder diffractionists community, and they
do not see any way to increase that power by playing with the
Internet. Internet appears as a game for young boys. A small
startup like the SDPD Internet Course gathers 10 times less
participants than a workshop at Bayreuth. I do not know about
the number of participants to the synchronous "Powder Diffraction
Advanced Certificate" at the Birkbeck College, University of London
http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/teaching/teaching.html

Who takes care to the SDPD group ? Soft dreamers probably,
believing in the continuous Internet expansion, in open source code, 
sharing knowledge and other oddities.

Armel Le Bail
http://www.cristal.org/iniref.html