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RE: Can employers forbid you from talking about IETF activities?

2001-05-30 07:20:03
The alternative, IMO, is to have IETF participants who are 
employed by
industry companies such as Cisco and Microsoft viewed as official
representatives of their companies rather than as 
individual (and independent)
participants.

would the Cisco rep's opinion count the same as the rep for Bill's
Bits-to-Go apartment-building-wide ISP?

I don't see why not. If any person can argument for his/she's cause and that is 
held up to actual facts - A's opinion would be as good as B's opinion. You 
cannot judge a persons knowledge on a given subject by simply looking at his 
workplace.

Of course Cisco or whatever large company probably have chosen their rep. with 
good care and from the first look his opinion would count more. But going into 
details you might be surprised how little a "general" rep. from a large company 
can know about certain topics, but still they have to represent it because it's 
their job (Who says they even have an interest). The little fellow from 
bits2go... might as well be an expert on topic as he/she could have been 
working on topic for a decades!

Conclusion: John Doe at Big-O-Mighty-World-wide-Company might not know as much 
as Jack Doe from Little-and-Extremely-Competent-Company on a given topic.

My 2 cents

-NS



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