--On Sunday, July 24, 2016 14:39 +0000 Phillip Hallam-Baker
<phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As a direct result of the Web, the majority of the reading
> public no longer get their news in dead tree form. Classified
> ads are gone. Demand for wood pulp is dramatically down over
> the past 20 years. I did not bother to pick up a printed
> agenda this time as I can't read the print any more.
Hyperbole is not, IMO, particularly helpful. With many
definitions of "the reading public", it is not clear that a
majority of them are even connected to the Internet in a
significant way.
I may just be showing my age (or the fact that I don't
particularly like smartphones), but I have yet to find an
application that adequately supports the types of ways I can use
and annotate paper or reference it.
Constructive suggestion (which might have been made before -- I
have not read this entire thread): if people think that paper/
tree-killing is significant enough, why not add a "do you want a
printed agenda" checkbox to the registration form for f2f
meeting attendance? Preparing packets individually based on
whether that was checked would probably be too much trouble, but
a rough count would at least provide the secretariat with
guidance about how many paper copies should be printed, reducing
waste. If, at some time in the future, only a handful of us
wanted them, then it might be time for them to go the way of,
e.g., CDs of proceedings.
john