REM@Mit-Mc.ARPA (Robert Elton Maas) (06/02/84)
It seems to me that more useful than conferences would be followup-links and magazines and keyword-access. Magazines are very close to conferences in logic design: Submitters propose articles, and the editor selects which ones will be included in each issue. What do you think of the similarity and differences? Keyword access gives an alternate way to introduce new topics/discussions from conference/magazine. Method 1 is for a customer to have a list of keywords heesh is interested in, and automatically receive in his keyword mailbox all articles with those keywords that are marked as "new-subject". Presumably all "old-subject" messages would either be received or not according to whether their predecessors were received or not (except when the customer grows tired of a topic and asks to stop receiving follow-ups from some point). Method 2 is for a customer to receive a summary of keywords in all "new-topic" messages, and then to manually pick which to read and which not. After reading such "new-topic" messages, heesh could decide whether to subscribe to the follow-up stream or not. Follow-up links are the preferred way I'd like to control what I receive and what I don't. I'd like to mark particular messages I see as interesting, so I'll receive any later message that lists it as a direct prerequisite. This would include additional information, errata, rebuttal, discussion/debate, and related topics that were sparked by the initial subject. Follow-up links are DAG (directed acyclic graph), the subject flow forks at each message, and occasionally somebody happens to write a summary message that joins together several different lines of thought that have something in common. But mostly follow-up links are tree-like, each message having one or zero prerequisite but an arbitrary number of follow-ups. Divergent branches in the tree may follow related subjects, or the topic may drift away from the original in several different directions. In a magazine or mailing list or conference it's nigh impossible to handle this divergence. Usually in a mailing list the readership must be burdened by all these divergent topics. Witness how HUMAN-NETS started with finding a public replacement for Arpanet but diverged into so many topics that at times it seems to be net.general in effect. But with follow-up links, any reader could select which branches to continue and which to prune, without adversely affecting anybody else who may have different choices. If the readership to any particular branch becomes very tiny, those who contribute could be warned; or better, whenever a messages is distributed the initial readership number could be included in the header, so persons thinking of replying would know whether to invest lots of time in a carefully-worded reply to hundreds or thousands, or slip off a quick reply to a half dozen, or not even bother if the readership has slipped to two (the author and the replyer). Has anybody provided a followup-link system for use on Arpanet?
MCGREGOR@hp-labs.csnet (Scott L. McGregor) (06/04/84)
The difference between a conference and a magazine is that in a conference, control is presumed to be democratic. Anyone (everyone) is welcome to speak. A magazine has a different power structure: There is the magazine staff of writers and editors who minister to the subscribers. This is a less equitable arrangement, but is good for delivering information from those who know to those who don't. A Conference is better for tasks like brain- storming which benefit from a more equal participation. As a veteran Conferencing Systems user and a new conferencing system developer, I am acutely aware of the problem of information and decision overload. The management of the number of branching and pruning decisions will require improved systems for handling these systems automatically. The drudgery of this task given the tools currently available in most conferencing systems today is one of the things that is keeping conferencing from taking the commercial data processing world by storm. It is hoped that some breakthroughs will be achieved in this area in the not too distant future, but it we probably won't see major changes in this community for a while. -------
Gisle_Hannemyr_@QZCOM.MAILNET (06/05/84)
If I interprete your note correctly, it main theme is a suggestion for a more "structured" way of using computer conferencing. While I am symphatic to mechanisms that can augment the quality and reduce the "noise level" in C.C., I think I should report my experience with a magazine model very close to the one you are proposing. For more than a year, two friends and myself has attempted to operate an "Electronic Magazine" along those lines as part of the Oslo COM system. This system is used daily by researchers at three of Norways largest academic institutions, and we hoped that this very special group of users should form a good user base (academics usually write a lot of reports of papers). However, so far we have not received one unsolicited contribution, and even friends and collegues we have approached has not been very forthcoming. Other experimenters with this form have reported equally spectacular failures. The explanations offered for lack of success concentrates on: 1) Electronic media lack the prestige of established scientific journals. 2) A C.C. system shared by friends and neighbours is a to intimate medium to be used to publish ambitious and aspiring research papers. We shall continue our experiment another year (also failure provides some insight), but it seems that the casual, fairly unstructured way traditional C.C. operates, is so far the best format for this form communication. I have no comment on the other topics raised in your entry -- but more powerful link and search mechanisms seems like a good idea.
Tommy_Ericson__QZ@QZCOM.MAILNET (06/05/84)
1) Prestige I have also given that item some thoughts. Is it not somewhat astonishing that bodies like ACM or IFIP have not begun moving over to electronic publishing? Will commersial papers like Datamation be the first? I say no, that would not look so good for the academic community.
Jacob_Palme_QZ@QZCOM.MAILNET (06/05/84)
In COM we have both ordinary conferences, where all participants can write whatever they want, and write-protected conferences, somewhat similar to what you call magazines. We also have different kinds of "selection conferences" into which selected entries from the normal conferences can be entered. Finally we store the "comment" links between entries into the data base, creating "sub-conferences" consisting of the items which are related directly or indirectly by comment links. There are a number of operations on such sub-conferences, such as scanning or searching in a sub- conference or skipping entries from a sub-conference. Our experience is that the sub-conference facility, or "comment tree" facility, or whathever you prefer to call it, is very much used and important for our users. Thus, we plan to put even more stress on this facility in future developments. Our experience is that the various kinds of write-protected conferences and selection conferences do provide some valuable services to some people, but in general have a problem in that too few entries are sent to them. This may be an economic problem, we have no tools at present for paying editors for such conferences, and this may be neccessary. Note that the concept of "keyword" and the concept of "conference" or "mailing list" is really very similar. Especially so in COM, where the same entry can be sent to several conferences, without forcing members of both conferences to see the entry twice. The idea of sending a note about graphics in Pascal to both the "Pascal" and the "graphics" conference/mailing list, is very similar to the idea of giving the note these two keywords. A difficulty with keywords may be that if you select items by keywords, you will get a somewhat random selection of items when you read them, depending on if someone happened to give the items the keyword you search on. With conferences and mailing lists, on the other hand, you will get a number of interrelated entries, and this is important because often the important information is not in one single item, but in the ideas created by the interrelation of items written by a number of people.
Jacob_Palme_QZ%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA (06/05/84)
References: <8406041609.AA15587@HP-VENUS> Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site houxe.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site hou3c.UUCP Message-ID: <57941@QZCOM> Date: Tue, 5-Jun-84 16:29:00 EDT Sender: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) ssages_to_be_transferred_to_the_Swedish_%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA Lines: 39 To: Message_Group_at_BRL_mailing_list%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA, "Robert Elton Maas" <rem@MIT-MC.ARPA>, "Scott L. McGregor" <MCGREGOR@hp-labs.csnet> Cc: msggroup@BRL-AOS.ARPA, MCGREGOR@Csnet-Relay.ARPA, Messages_to_be_transferred_to_the_Swedish_%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA In-Reply-To: <8406041609.AA15587@HP-VENUS> In COM we have both ordinary conferences, where all participants can write whatever they want, and write-protected conferences, somewhat similar to what you call magazines. We also have different kinds of "selection conferences" into which selected entries from the normal conferences can be entered. Finally we store the "comment" links between entries into the data base, creating "sub-conferences" consisting of the items which are related directly or indirectly by comment links. There are a number of operations on such sub-conferences, such as scanning or searching in a sub- conference or skipping entries from a sub-conference. Our experience is that the sub-conference facility, or "comment tree" facility, or whathever you prefer to call it, is very much used and important for our users. Thus, we plan to put even more stress on this facility in future developments. Our experience is that the various kinds of write-protected conferences and selection conferences do provide some valuable services to some people, but in general have a problem in that too few entries are sent to them. This may be an economic problem, we have no tools at present for paying editors for such conferences, and this may be neccessary. Note that the concept of "keyword" and the concept of "conference" or "mailing list" is really very similar. Especially so in COM, where the same entry can be sent to several conferences, without forcing members of both conferences to see the entry twice. The idea of sending a note about graphics in Pascal to both the "Pascal" and the "graphics" conference/mailing list, is very similar to the idea of giving the note these two keywords. A difficulty with keywords may be that if you select items by keywords, you will get a somewhat random selection of items when you read them, depending on if someone happened to give the items the keyword you search on. With conferences and mailing lists, on the other hand, you will get a number of interrelated entries, and this is important because often the important information is not in one single item, but in the ideas created by the interrelation of items written by a number of people.
Gisle_Hannemyr_@QZCOM.MAILNET (06/06/84)
Other examples include Senders' (defunct) "On-line Scientific Journal" (report in "The Information Scientist" 2:1; and the Bristish BLEND. (B. Shackel, The BLEND System. Programme for the study of some 'electronic journals'., "Ergonomics" 25:4. These experiments also attempt to add prestige to publication by issuing parallell paper editions. Shackels paper contains references to numerous other experiments. I believe that to experiment with a "true" electronic journal you must: 1) NOT publish a parallell paper edition. Then it be just another journal that also exist in machine readable form. 2) Having it exist within the framework of a large dynamic conference system, so that one can monitor the effect of those most interesting characteristics of using a computer: a) Very short time between acceptance and publication. b) "Instant" feedback, dialogue between author and reader. Jacob Palme mentions <57941> the problem of paying the editor of such an "Electronic magazine". I am very interested in the topic, and would be happy to accept the editorship of such an magazine in COM@QZ without being paid. However, I proably could not get my University to pay for the computer time such an activity would require at the QZ Oden host, so QZ would have to donate the cycles.