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<p>I would like to hear exactly what the advocates of doing a survey hope to gain from it.<br>
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A survey about what people use MPI for today might give useful information if the survey is well constructed. One that asks questions about what they expect to want to do over the next decade could conceivably give useful information though I think it would be hard to construct well and hard to interpret. <br>
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Asking questions about complex technical options by giving very brief overviews, each crafted by a person who knows what answer they want seems to have almost zero chance of giving useful feedback. At most it gives the person with a particular agenda a way to argue that his agenda has strong support. Of course, in most (or all) cases, if the survey question had been crafted by a skeptic of that agenda, the support would not be seen and the argument would be that the public is clearly not on board.<br>
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In reality neither question tells us how the community will respond to the ultimate content of the MPI 3 standard. Responsible, professional polling organization have highly trained specialists crafting supposedly balanced questions and still freely confess that a favorable response to question is not the same as genuine support for the underlying issue.<br>
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I, for one, will not give it much credence when somebody brings forward a 20 page extension to the standard and says: "We must vote this in because my 20 word question about it got 85% favorable." <br>
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Dick <br>
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Dick Treumann - MPI Team <br>
IBM Systems & Technology Group<br>
Dept X2ZA / MS P963 -- 2455 South Road -- Poughkeepsie, NY 12601<br>
Tele (845) 433-7846 Fax (845) 433-8363<br>
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