[Air-L] Yay for Jeremy

[Jeremy hunsinger]

Thanks everyone.  as for reading the thesis, I'd recommend reading the
things i've already published, that will give you basically all of it, more
or less.   I'll likely post the abstract to my blog eventually and the title
has already been available on twitter and facebook:)  It is Constructing a
politics of knowledge in the age of the internet.
As for AoIR, I have to say that while I did my share back in the day, I was
no where near the main man, i was just one person among many over several
years.  I blame AoIR primarily on Steve Jones, who we should thank
immensely, and I blame the success of the first conference on Nancy and her
willingness to put up with an email barrage from me that would likely
overwhelm anyone else and everything since then has been a group effort.  I
do know that i wouldn't have been able to do my work in aoir without Charlie
Breindahl, who was responsible for the listservs and the webpage designs, he
was the sancho panza to my don quixote, Ben Bates who took care of
membership management, which was a very different and difficult job.  Ulla
Bunz also, who worked on IR 1.0 locally in Kansas was seemingly indefatigable,
and saved my bacon by doing quite a lot of work quite a few times in fairly
short notice.  I lay the early success of AoIR at the feet of this group,
however, I don't think anyone would be remiss in saying that the conference
and program chairs over the years were also very significant people and
contributed immensely.  Our contributions though are fading into the past,
and I think... That's great!

Today, I think AoIR is moving on to bigger and better things.  While the
management styles have varied over the years, one has to admit that the
Executive committee, which is still an all-volunteer operation, is doing a
great job and making a series of difficult decisions and difficult workloads
seem easy, and they should be heartily congratulated.

One page that i demanded (as i am want to do about web pages) be transferred
to the new site when it was last recreated is this one:
http://aoir.org/?page_id=45  page 45.... it lists the executive board
members of the association of internet researchers.  they aren't the only
people that should be remembered though, there are people like Jenny
Stromer-Galley who was our vote counter for years,  Matt Stoner who
organized the only cross-institutional, cross-faculty graduate seminar to
prepare student's work the conferences that we ever had,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/aoir/seminar/ .  There is the AoIR Ethics working
group and publishing working group, the conference chairs mentioned above,
the graduate student representatives and graduate students that help with
the conferences.  The people who were on the initial listserv that arose out
of the conference at UIowa that Thom Swiss put and the people that joined
thereafter that contributed to early discussions, people like Greg Elmer,
Gil Rodman, Christine Hine, Michel Menou, etc.  All in all, there must be
around 100 or more people that have made AoIR work at it's operating level,
but there is clearly a community of participants of several thousand now.

So while I appreciate Barry's intent and I welcome the congratulations on
passing my defense and I thank my committee for that, I think that for AoIR
to speak of a main man is somewhat misleading, what we have is a community
of people doing many many things over the years and in the end, we are still
here 11+ years later.... To me that's something wonderful.