This is where we try to provide, as best we can within the limits of today's technologies, an area for easy informal discussion and exchanges. As the conference opens, we have two venues to offer to for this, both over in the conference's WebBoard.

The first of these is the After Hours section of the Board, which gives you a convenient place to lodge your thoughts, challenges, and queries to the meeting, above and beyond what is found in the more structured specialised tracks. We might add that since this area, like the others, is easliy searchable, you will, if you use the search facility, be able to find the remarks of specific people on on specific topics. You will find that can be quite handy.

In addition to this, you can set up 'chat sessions', using the button bar located up top which will take you directly into the chat area. You will find that this is easy to use, well explained, and more useful than you might at first think. Give it a try. Set up an informal meeting with several of your colleagues in soem distant part of the world, and see what you can accomplish on the strength of a little ingenuity and a local telephone call.

The future of this sort of contact -- the quite near future in fact -- is sure to be rich and interesting. The means for doing better are already there and a number of us who happen to be daily users of these technologies for our distance work are already getting used to setting up informal sessions with voice and even video exchanges, again on the bais of a local telephone call. This is not to say of course that all of this works perfectly all the time. The biggest villain holding things back these days is not the technologies but Net slowdown. But one learns to live with that and still get the job done. For those with an interst in following these developments, and possbily making use of some of these tools, the Teleconferecning track is the place to go for more.

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