Cyberspace
Developing Social Capital Online
By ManMohan S. Sodhi
In the April 2002 issue of OR/MS Today, referring to Putnam's "Bowling Alone," Mike Trick wrote about the need for OR/MS professionals to develop social capital. I cannot think of a better example of OR/MS professionals having done so than getting INFORMS and OR/MS online.
Phase I: Virtual Groups
In 1993, there were already a few specialized e-mail list servers relevant for OR. Then Ramesh Sharda created ORCS-L, an unmoderated discussion group for a broader OR audience, and M. Grötschel and U. Zimmermann started a moderated e-mail-based weekly digest, OPT-NET. Also, some OR people were using the newsgroup sci.math.num-analysis. I liked the threaded discussion aspect of newsgroups, but "numerical analysis" did not seem like the right place for OR discussion. I raised the issue of creating an OR newsgroup. Several people supported the idea but no one wanted to take the initiative. I rushed in where angels feared to tread, and Arthur Geoffrion encouraged me to pursue the idea.
There were quite a few challenges in the summer of 1993. It is impossible to add to the "big eight" categories — comp, sci, humanities, misc, news, rec, soc and talk — and very difficult to add one at the second level below these. A newsgroup administrator also confirmed that he would not allow it. So I proposed a newsgroup at the third level under sci.math, and began an online discussion on "sci.math.operations-research." Some discussants strongly felt OR should not be "under" mathematics. Some wanted a name reflecting the European name, operational research. Some did not want anything to do with operations because it sounded too close to "military operations." The discussion was not converging and time was running out for a vote on the creation of the newsgroup. I contacted the administrator group again, and luckily, this time I found someone who was sympathetic to a second-level newsgroup. I abbreviated the name as well to sci.op-research just before the vote that passed the proposal with near unanimity in August 1993. Within a year it had an estimated readership of 17,000, becoming the fifth most popular sci newsgroup.
Paul Rubin has been a steadfast contributor to sci.op-research from the start. Irv Lustig is another key source, answering CPLEX-related questions. Brian Borchers has been e-mailing a weekly digest of postings on ORCS-L; Mike Trick archived these digests for a while. The newsgroup is now archived at www.groups.google.com. John Gregory started the frequently asked-questions (FAQ) lists on linear and non-linear programming that Robert Fourer now maintains and posts.
Phase II: Centralized Information Repositories
After the creation of sci.op-research, the INFORMS IT Committee chaired by Jim Bean invited me to join them to discuss creating an online resource for INFORMS. We considered gopher, which was popular then, and I got some experience by helping to implement one for the Mathematical Programming Symposium in Ann Arbor, Mich. It was increasingly becoming clear, however, that the Web would be better than gopher. So we put our bets on the Web; Jim himself programmed some of the pages in HTML, and I learned some Perl programming and WAIS technology to provide the membership database and the bibliographic database online. With the initial implementation completed, Jim and I announced INFORMS Online in OR/MS Today in February 1995.
To lead INFORMS Online to the next level, Mike Trick, who had put together a Web-based list of OR/MS resources, was selected to be the founding editor a few months later. He set up a good organization and a team that included Brian Borchers (other team members are listed at www.informs.org/about.html). Matt Saltzman succeeded Mike as editor and continues writing the Informs Online column that Mike started in OR/MS Today.
Phase III: Online Publication
The idea of online publications started with our IT Committee in 1994 but the technology was not mature then. The breakthrough came five years later, under the editorship of Mike Trick, to offer INFORMS Pubs-Online with sophisticated search engines and articles in the easily accessible PDF format. Mark Daskin and Kathye Long announced it in June 1999.
A parallel thread discussing online publication was started by Terry Harrison, editor of Interfaces, initially to provide online materials (and e-mail) supporting Interfaces articles. While his efforts finally converged with Pubs-Online, Interfaces provides much more of its articles online than any other INFORMS journal. Tables of contents are available going back to 1972, and full articles going to back to 1977 are available via the Interfaces home page on Pubs-Online.
References
- Daskin, M. and Long K., 1999, "E-Publishing Comes to INFORMS," ORMS Today, June 1999.
- Bean J., and Sodhi, M., 1995, "Electronic Society - INFORMS Online," ORMS Today, February 1995.
- Sodhi, M., 1993, "Usenet News Group Connects OR/MS Community," ORMS Today, October 1993.
- Sodhi, M., 1995, "An OR/MS Guide to the Internet," Interfaces, Vol. 25, No. 6 (November-December), 1995
- Trick, M., 1999, "Publications Online," ORMS Today, August 1999.
- Trick, M., 2002. "Raising Social Capital," ORMS Today, April 2002.
ManMohan S. Sodhi recently joined the faculty at Cass Business School in London. He welcomes your comments at M.Sodhi@city.ac.uk.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2002 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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