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Re: New Southeast Asia Research Links

On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Brian Wassom wrote:

> To the Debate Community;
> 
> debaters eager to get a jump on their research.  And this is just the
> first batch--more links will soon follow.  So far as I can tell, this
> page is the first of its kind on the net with SE Asia links.  Hope
> you'll stop by!
> 
> http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/2253/debate.htm

Oh NOOOO.  Here we go again.  Was anyone listening three weeks ago when I
posted a PLEA to coordinate these sites this year?  The Columbia Debate
research site (if it matters, yours is not the first - ours went up a few
days ago) is now filling up with Southeast Asia links, with many more to
come when the topic is announced - UNLESS we manage to coordinate this, we
will once again have three virtually identical debate research sites. 
This duplication of effort is not only a waste of time, it's
short-changing the debaters.  If we divide our work and each do a section,
we can get greater depth, more links, more descriptions of the linked
resources, and a site with greater overall utility.  Last year, the
Columbia site included: 

1) General news resources.  These have been updated and will be expanded
more in the next few weeks.  In addition to Web search engines like
AltaVista and Lycos, there are links to the Web pages for newspapers, wire
services, and news agencies covering events around the world.

2) Topic-specific links.  Last year, they were grouped into subject areas,
though this year we will probably split them up by country.  There were
over 250 of these by mid-Fall on the Columbia site.

3) Generic positions.  I included about a half-dozen links to nanotech and
a-life, but that's as far as it went.  ANYONE INTERESTED IN SETTING UP A
GENERIC RESEARCH SITE should let me know, and I'll just put in a link to
you, along with a brief statement of gratitude.  See the Columbia Debate
research page for more details.

4) Case lists.  Last year, we had the most complete set of caselists in
CEDA history, compiled largely by reformatting lists posted to the "L,"
though I also typed in a few of them by hand when I received hard copies
from tournaments.  I DO NOT PLAN TO DO THIS AGAIN.  VOLUNTEERS?  Once
again, dividing the work would make for a better resource for the
debaters.  A searchable index would be awesome, but even just
HTML-formatted lists would be quite useful.

5) Case-specific research sites.  We started putting these online in the
Spring, but it didn't seem to raise much interest.  If someone wants to
take this, be my guest.


PLEASE NOTE: Columbia's page is only really laying claim to the first two
items this year, and even that is negotiable.  Brian, please, please,
please contact me and let's see if we can get organized on this.  Last
year, the Columbia site was a tremendous amount of work, and I would like
to spend a little less time on it this year, especially since I have a
doctoral thesis to write.

Hopefully, other folks will see this note and join in - last time I posted
this plea, I got no response at all, and now we have two interchangeable
research sites.  This is not a cut against Brian (I'm going to visit your
site and put a link to it on ours, of course), but I'm feeling a bit
frustrated here. 

          --Alan

__________________
Alan Dove
N3IMU
ad52@columbia.edu
http://128.59.173.136/Poliolab/Alan/Dove.html
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