Subject: Ponz/Vilspa request vrs Don's message

From: Andre HECK <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Dec 94 10:43:21 +0100

It happened that I talked to D.J. Ponz on the phone some time ago for
other reasons. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned he had
sent an e-mail to Don about AstroWeb and was puzzled because he had
received no answer. I suggested then he sent a message to the astroweb
account with his proposal in order to generate a discussion among us and
that we would go back to him. This is a bit of history and we are now
right in the middle of this discussion.

What I understood from this brief conversation with DJP (I suggest we
use this acronym since we have now two Daniel involved with AstroWeb),
is that he did not necessarily wanted to be a full member of the
consortium (although I guess he would have nothing against it - his
employer might think differently, but this is his business to sort this
out).

I appreciate fully the succession of steps in Don's thinking. Although
I am not sure we have to go so far in DJP's case, it is clear that once
the precedent will be created, we'll have no reason to deny access to
people in similar or related situations (remember the discussion we had 
at the very beginning about this gentleman from Muenster?).

I invite then everyone to reassess their position in view of Don's
comments. A way out might be to have two categories of links to AstroWeb:
full members and associated ones. My understanding from the conversation
with DJP earlier on and the various positions expressed is that this
`associate' status would stop after the first sentence of Point 3 in
Don's sequence (i.e. on the exploder, but not beyond). We might also
have a two-step exploder: one for full members only and another one for
full members + associates.

AH.
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