_ The Zero Emissions Strategy Conference
_ The Zero Emissions Strategy Conference
Eric Britton, EcoPlan International, Paris.
For the Zero Emissions Targeting Conference, The Commons.
Page Contents:
- The Original Problem with the Discussion Panels
- Our Communications Target for the Conference
- Instructions for Joining and Using the Discussion Panels
- A Few Hints To Get You Going
- Organization of the Discussions
- A Short Overview of Online Conferencing
- Will What We Are Proposing Here Be Enough?
- And If You Are Looking For More
- Your comments and discussion of this presentation
Summary: This paper introduces the Cyber-Forum, the new communications capabilities which are being brought on line today in support of our conference. The author opens with a short background note on the problems that such panels often face, and then goes on to give details which are intended to help participants in our conference access and make easy use of the new system. The former is intended as part of our commitment to report to you fully and honestly on both the achievements and the short-comings of this attempt at putting a virtual conference to work, this shared learning experience. If you are in a hurry, you may wish to go directly to Instructions for Joining and Using the Cyber-Forum. And if you are even in a greater hurry than that, well just check in to the new Cyber-Forum right here. The net-savvy among you will probably be able to figure it out on their own. Or maybe not.
Prelude: It had been our original intention to run some fairly ambitious interactive pages and capabilities in support of the conference, in particular for the Discussion Panels but also for searching the extensive contents of the conference site (via keywords or strings). When done well this can lead to a much easier flow of both access and 'conversation' on the site, as well as rather neater and more intuitively traceable organization of the materials. (It also incidentally can reduce greatly the work involved in site maintenance which one gets saddled with in non-automated setups, a not-inconsiderable advantage for your poor Webmasters). For these purposes, we went out and purchased the latest version of MS FrontPage (97) which appeared to offer some rather nice provision for this. Unfortunately, however, when all the work was done, we ran into a last minute stone wall with our WWW site provider (Prime Host)which at first defied understanding.The bottom line of our problem turned out to be that while we could create and then load our rather neat 'interactive' pages onto the site, we were unable to get them to interact as needed... above all because our provider, for cited reasons of security, was unwilling to accept the little interactive gizmos (WebBots, cgi script, even ticklers) that are required to provide such handling capabilities. (None of this of course was posted or anything like that. Caveat emptor. We were thus given one choice: try it, and then try to figure out why or why not!) Faced with this -- and our commitment to provide the best possible discussion capabilities to on the conference -- we immediately sent out an SOS to a handful of people and places around the world whom we thought might help (all of whom, incidentally, personally unknown to us). For the record, if you now move over to The Discussion Forum: Commentary on (Virtual) Conferencing & Tools you will see some of the responses that came in within 24 hours from respondents willing to help in Canada, the States, France, Sweden, Britain, and New Zealand (again, from people completely unknown to us). Eventually these exchanges led to the solution which will be presented here below, but first let us take a step back to consider some of the practical objectives that we were trying to address.
We take your time with this simple listing of the past, because we wish most definitely to go on record here that it is not our view that the various virtual arrangements, some of which are set out and used here, are going to offer total and immediate replacements of all those tools that we have worked with over the years. We see them not as replacements, but as potential -- and we must stress this word potential since there is nothing automatic about their eventual success -- complements and extensions of what we already have in hand.
The tools which we are making use of in this conference are the ones that permit us to get together to address and hopefully advance the important topic of this meeting without having to leave our offices, laboratories, or places of work. Once again they involve a considerable spectrum, some of which are already familiar to many of you, others perhaps less so. Email and just behind it various forms of electronic bulletin boards (BBS's), the oldest of which already have several decades of experience behind them. In addition, we have to take into account such things as Internet and its many variants, newsgroups, electronic fora of various sorts, chat systems, whiteboarding, computer to computer data exchanges, and data, voice and videoconferencing systems of many kinds and qualities.
The present paper is focused specifically on the arrangements which we are trying to provide here to permit exchanges and discussions among the conference participants, which will allow us all to go a full step beyond the read and yawn (or cheer) mode that is so well known to conferencers everywhere. And as we move ahead on this we will do well to bear in mind the various forms of communications that make a good conference and agreeable and instructive place to be. A good conferencer is not a totally passive beast: she or he react both in the conference hall itself, in plenary, in work groups and chart sessions, and out in the lobby and beyond. In setting up our communications arrangements for a virtual conference, we should also be bearing in mind ways in which we can possible at least in part substitute for this rich spectrum of exchange possibilities. And while it is not possible for me to attack this issue in any useful way today, I would like nonetheless to put it on the agenda for future consideration.
All they have to do to visit the site is to go http://center.hamline.edu They can log in and
self register. It asks for passwords a lot on the first registration but
that is because we have some firewalls- just be patient and after that it
is very simple. There are a lot of help buttons and things are pretty straight forward. But do tell them not to worry -- we support the organizers with help. John
Vinton and I (Tom Abeles) lurk in the background and will be there when they need us.
With this behind us, you may now participate in the discussions by following
these easy step-by-step instructions:
Our discussion space is organized into approximately a dozen topics. We have tried to avoid the sort of rampant topic proliferation that one sometimes finds in fora of this sort, on the grounds that it thus becomes rather difficult to follow the sense of the meeting. In due course we will certainly modify and possibly add to this list, but for now the discussion topics include:
You will find further information which will help put these topics into context in the forum itself. And if you have yet other discussion items to propose, let us hear from you.
Hamline's system keeps a permanent record of each discussion, allowing you to refer back to old responses if you need to and enabling late-comers to join a conversation. This also makes old discussions available as an information resource.
Hamline's system keeps track of your place in each discussion, enabling you to automatically pick up where you left off each time you log on. A personalized list of conferences lets you focus on the subjects that interest you with a minimum amount of navigation.
These features make it easy to participate in several discussions at once, keeping up with everything that gets said, and to take as much time as you need to formulate your thoughts on a subject, without the tedium of managing, saving, deleting, and making decisions about email. The conversation runs itself. All you have to do is participate (or just read), with only a few mouse clicks.
Another powerful feature of the system is that it allows participants to point to other resources on the internet. Participants have full access to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) in posting their responses and therefore can include links to other important resources directly into a conference.
Conversations are grouped by broad subject area into conferences. For example, there might be a conference on politics, another for a course or work group, and another on open public discussion. The Hamline Conference Administrator determines what conferences are present on the system. The Administrator also sets whether a conference is public, open to anyone on the system, or private, closed and accessible only to certain individuals.
Within each conference are numbered items. The item is nominally a single discussion about a particular subject. For instance, a Politics conference might include topics on elections, particular issues, candidates, local government, etc. Each topic has a title identifying its subject.
An item is composed of numbered responses, each by an individual participant. You participate in each item by reading its responses through to the end, at which point you have the option of making a response of your own. In Hamline's system, you respond to the item as a whole rather than to a specific reponse therein--there is no "threading" within topics. This results in a more focused and easy-to-follow conversation.
In a single session you will typically cycle through a number of items in several conferences. The next time you log in, the system can show you only the new responses in items that have had activity since your previous visit.
Each conference is typically maintained by one or more organizers, who are assigned the job of conference upkeep and given a few special privileges to make that job easier. Organizers can keep topics lively, mediate or terminate disputes, and post useful information. Organizers are also usually the first people to create topics in a conference.
Taking it from the top, as it were, the fact is that the Hamline site itself today not only offers not one but a range of communication possibilities -- and indeed a wider range than you will probably initially suspect -- but that if you stayed tuned in you will almost certainly be able to witness a steady progression of new tools and routines that will be brought on line and made available to enhance what is the basic business of their forum (and ours) -- namely, virtual conferencing in all its eventual complexity and, indeed, glory .
And here within this forum, we are already looking forward to finding good ways in short order to improve out group work efficiency. To this end we intend to interface all of the conferencing tools which are already in play here, with a couple of others, already in the weeks immediately ahead. Specifically, we are already looking for partners within our group (i.e., maybe you!)who might be interested in stretching one further notch by cooperating with us to test and bring on line in parallel to the above a combination of Mirabilis's ICQ, Microsoft's NetMeeting and Netscape Conference. These communications utilities (all Beta's, hence free for the downloading) combine to offer new multilevel distance interfaces via a local telephone call with a fast and loose, user-to-chose combination of audio, video, chat, file exchange and whiteboarding links. They can be used to set up ON LINE (and handy off line) discussions (and multimedia exchanges) in 1-on-1 or multiparty conferencing situations.
Let me not take any more of your valuable time with this today, other than to invite the more intrepid of you to join us in seeing what we can do to push out the limits of these technologies for the important purposes of this conference, and the rest of you to enjoy and take advantage now of the new discussion arrangements which we are now pleased to be able to offer you with the kind help of our friends from Hamline.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that once you've settled on a conferencing software package and got your forum up and running the hard work is over. That's the easy part. The hard part is managing your forum on a daily basis once you've got it going, nurturing your growing community until it becomes essentially self-sustaining, and managing your message base as it becomes broader and deeper. If
you have difficulty setting aside time to check your e-mail on a daily basis I don't think trying to set up a forum will work for you. Forums take a lot of time to run."
Amen.
About the site: Comments to Webmaster [webmaster@the-commons.org ]
Our Ambitious Communications Target for the Conference
"Virtual conferencing" -- getting together to cook up ideas at a distance -- involves a shifting spectrum of technologies and organizational arrangements that stretches across many possibilities and variants, several of which are being used in the present collaborative undertaking. Traditional (snail) mail, phone(POTS... plain old telephone service, and even the suddenly very old indeed fax technologies are valuable tools which have served well for years and are not about to go out of fashion in a burst of instantaneous visualizing. But we should not forget either the other media, including of course the print media in all their various permutations and forms, as well as radio and television (in both their live and "canned" versions). All this may seem a trifle old fashioned in today's overheated technology world, but if you scratch to see what in fact is being done with these older media in more innovational modes, you will find some quite surprising and promising results. Then of course there is actual physical conferencing, which itself encompasses a wide variety of arrangements and effectiveness, environmental warts and all.
Instructions for Joining and Using the Cyber-Forum
Before getting into the detailed use instructions, let us first quote from a message received several days ago from the Hamline Center's organizers as we were laying the preparations for all this. I think you will find it reassuring. I paraphrase:
"Welcome to The Center@Hamline. This Center of bits and bytes is complemented with the bricks and mortar of Hamline University in St. Paul, MN, USA. The Center regrets that it is unable, in our cyber center, to provide food and beverages, currently. They are strictly 'bring your own'. But if there are other needs to make your program a success, please feel free to contact us. The system is really simple and it should give your colleagues few problems to use quickly. Tell them just try it. We have had "little old ladies in sneakers" come into the system and make it work fine the first time. Pretend that it is user friendly and it will be. You can't blow the system up and at worst just pretend that it is stupid and try it all over again.
1. Go to http://center.hamline.edu
2. Click on the 'Enter ==> The Center @ Hamline' link;
3. Click on the 'Self Registration' link;
4. Fill in the form indicating interest in the "zestrategies" conference;
5. Supply userid, password on prompt (keep short since you are going to use each time to enter first);
6. Confirm password when prompted;
7. Provide personal information in form as requested (Your Full Name is all that's
required at this point);
8. Click to Tutorial, and after a few minutes there you will be ready to go to the Caucus Center ;
9. Scroll down to 'Join a Conference by name'; there enter
"zestrategies" in the provided space;
10. Click the yes button to add the conference to your personal conference list (so that it comes up automatically the next time around);
11. On the zestrategies home page, have a look and click on the discussion topic of
interest to participate.A Few Hints To Get You Going
You're now ready to begin. But just in case it might be useful, here are a few additional ideas for making best use of this part of the conference.
Organization of the Cyber-Forum
A Short Overview of Online Conferencing
The following has been taken directly from the Hamline University site, and is reproduced here in the event you wish a bit more background before making the leap. A more in-depth discussion of conferencing is available on the site from the developers of the system, Screen Porch, and will be available to you as soon as you check in to the Center.
Online conferencing enables written online group discussions. Unlike online "chat," participants need not all be logged on at once. Instead, conversations typically take place over days, weeks, or even months. Unlike mailing lists or Usenet, the discussion is stored in a central place, ensuring that responses are consecutive and that no one adds a new reponse without having had the opportunity to read all of what's been said so far. The result is a linear, sequential discourse that has the feel of a real-life conversation.
Conferences, Items, and Responses
Will What We Are Proposing Here Be Enough?
There is no doubt in my mind that the system which we now are able to present to you here is but a step in the right direction, and certainly not the end of a long journey. In fact, there is no doubt there either that most of the progress that we shall eventually see in these matters is yet to come.
And If You Are Looking For More
If you are thinking about setting up your own online discussion have a look at Resources for Moderators and Facilitator of Online Discussion, and Tips on Shopping for Forum Software. You might also do well to have a look at "Participation in scholarly electronic forums". This last offers a bit of good sense about virtual conferencing that I are pleased to share with you here in closing:
"Why put your own forum on the web? The only reason to do so is to build a community of people, whether these are people with whom you share a common
interest, or people who use your product and to whom you want to offer support.
__ Commentary & Discussion of This Paper (Once you have registered)
__ Go to Other Podium Presentations 
__ CyberForum Discussion Guidelines
Page last updated on 10 September 1997.
Copyright © 1994-1997, EcoPlan International, Paris,France. ® All rights reserved.
