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From: dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu (David Lawyer)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,talk.politics.soviet
Subject: USSR International Computer Club (was: Information on the ICC)
Summary: Comments and criticism of USSR ICC charter
Message-ID: <1315@orion.cf.uci.edu>
Date: 16 Jan 89 01:02:58 GMT
References: <10127@well.UUCP>
Sender: news@orion.cf.uci.edu
Reply-To: dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu (David Lawyer)
Organization: University of California at Irvine.  Electrical Engineering
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Sender:

ICC stands for the International Computer Club which was recently
(Dec.  1988) founded in Moscow, USSR.  Recently a poor translation of
the "charter" of this new club was posted (10127@well.UUCP) to
comp.misc by John Draper (crunch@well.UUCP).  It was called:
"Agreement on the Establishment of the International Computer Club" and
is about 7 pages long.  Both organizations and individuals may join
this club.  This club purports to be an "international non-government
organization" but the charter needs to be revised in order to really
make it such.

The only ones who can vote in the club are the organizations (founders)
who join prior to 1991.  Most of the signatories of the ICC agreement
(charter or actually a partial charter) are Soviet organizations
although there is some representation from the U.S., Britain, and
France.  Thus it is likely that unless the charter is modified, Soviet
members will have a majority of votes and this is not what a truly
international organization should be like.

Another serious flaw in this agreement is that it can only be altered
by unanimous decision of "all Contracting Parties and organizations
...".  This is absurd.  It would seems that a 2/3 majority of those
voting should be enough for charter revision.

What should be done is to widely circulate a proposed charter for
comment on the net (and also on Soviet networks etc.) and elsewhere and
then try to base the final document on what the general consensus of
world opinion seems to be.

I believe that one of its purposes should be promoting the creation,
archiving and distribution of free software including machine
translation of source codes from one natural language to another (e.g.
Russian to English).  While over a whole page of purposes are listed,
this was not one of them.

When will the charter itself (mistranslated as "statute") be
available?  The charter is supposed to be an "integral part of the
present Agreement".  Does this mean that a subset of the Agreement
constitutes the charter?

Also needed in the charter is a reference to the code of procedure to
be used at meetings: Robert's Rules of Order, Sturgis Standard Code of
Parliamentary Procedure, etc., suitably modified for "electronic meetings" 
via the networks.  Does such a procedural code exist?

Needless to say, the ICC should become a newsgroup on the net:
comp.icc.  If ISO 8859-5 ([International Standards Organization]
Eight-bit single-byte graphic character sets; Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet)
is to be used for this group, the net needs to be upgraded to handle 8
bit (binary) transmissions.  We will then need terminals which can
handle this Latin/Cyrillic font so that we can read postings in both
Russian, English, and other languages.  The talk.politics.soviet group
might also utilize this font.