[Sigifp-l] Greetings from your SIG President!

[Tomas Lipinski]

February 23, 2007


Greetings ASIS Information Policy SIG members!

I apologize for not making contact sooner but we've been hard at work and wanted to wait until we had some news to share with you. So let this first official message from your SIG president serve as a press release of developments. 

First, let me take this opportunity to thank John Gathegi for both his leadership and inspiration as previous SIG president! Second, thanks also to those other SIG members who will serve as your officers this year. Jeffrey Forrest - Secretary; Shelly Warwick - Treasurer; Terry Maxwell - Listserv Moderator; and Janice Swiatek-Kelly - Newsletter Correspondent Full contact information for these individuals can be found on the officers page http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/asist-ifp/officers.html <http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/asist-ifp/officers.html>  

Now to the fun stuff! We have revised the SIG web site, hopefully making it more useful to members and more attractive to browsers and the curious. (Again thanks to the team at FSU who got the web site off the ground in 2006). In the future we hope to make the web site a more active source/tool of communication for members in the area of information policy. If you have any thoughts for improvement please contact the new Information Policy SIG webmaster Rebecca Hall at UWM at rjhall at uwm.edu .

The first new feature of the website we're rolling out takes advantage of the many great lectures, presentations, etc. that are offered throughout the year, outside of the formal conference network but that may nonetheless be of great interest to SIG members in the area of information policy. Often these lectures are recorded for posterity but little use is made of them outside the sponsoring institution or organization. We would like to provide a point of access to this rich source of SIG member knowledge. For lack of a better word we call this part of the site "C-mini" for "conference in miniature" http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/asist-ifp/c_mini.html . C-mini offers links to lectures of interest related to information policy that have been recorded and are available on the Internet from SIG member institutions, organizations, etc. If you follow the link you will see a cluster of initial submissions from a lecture series that our own CIPR (Center for Information Policy Research here at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee) sponsored this past fall. The Colloquia consisted of talks from visiting/guest speakers/lecturers. These are people not regularly associated with our university so folks generally don't have the opportunity to hear them speak, likewise SIG members might not have that opportunity either. So we recorded their guest lecture/presentation. 

Here's how you can contribute! If you're hosting a guest speaker at your institution, organization, etc. and will be recording his or her presentation/lecture/etc. and would like to make it more widely accessible, just email the URL of the lecture to Rebecca Hall, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee at rjhall at uwm.edu . Please include all details such as name and affiliation of the speaker, date and context of the presentation and title and short description. Don't include your own lectures and those of your co-workers but save this for talks of note from scholars, professionals, etc. who are not normally affiliated with you or your institution. 

Second, we hope to have two editions of our planned "NEWSLETTER" out in 2007. This was an idea envisioned under John Gathegi's tenure as president but that never quite got off the ground. We'll begin small in both scope and detail, trying to develop a proto-type that can be expanded as time, resources and ideas permit. If at any time you have any thoughts about the scope or content of the NEWSLETTER please contact me. I am all ears at this point. Initially the NEWSLETTER will be produced in conjunction with the CIPR (Elizabeth Buchanan, Director) here at UWM. This gives us the staffing power needed to successfully undertake such a project and tap into the editorial expertise of Dr. Buchanan who is a frequent guest editor for The Journal of Information Ethics and Co-Editor of the INSEIT (International Society for Ethics and Information Technology) Newsletter. I will serve as general coordinator and editor of our newsletter. If anyone would like to work on developing a newsletter or prototype of a newsletter in 07, we would be happy to work with you. Just let me know! 

Finally, I'd like to include a simple directory area on the website for those members that would like to participate. The directory would organize the diverse areas of information policy into various sub topics and then list those members whose research, teaching, or interests coincide with that area. Obviously creating a taxonomy that would satisfy everyone's array of expertise may provide some challenge, as one could envision one along topical lines (intellectual property, privacy, free speech, security, telecommunications, etc.) or along discipline/subject lines such as law, philosophy/ethics, economics, etc. or approach/methodological lines or some other factors. Another option would be to list participating individual members alphabetically (or by institution, organization, etc.) including several points of profile information (topic, discipline, approach/methodology?) that would allow others to understand the work that he or she performs. Stay tuned for developments on this area. If anyone would like to oversee or undertake this project just let me know. 

All the best for 07!

tomas


Tomas A. Lipinski, J.D., LL.M., Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Information Studies
University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA 53201
414-229-4908, 414-229-6699 (fax)

"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely
because it comes late." Henslee v. Union Planters National Bank & Trust
Co., 335 U.S. 595, 600 (1949) (Frankfurter, J. dissenting) (upon
realizing his error in a previous decision and joining Justice Douglas
and Justice Jackson in dissent).