ENA UPDATE
by Lisa Kimball


ENA has taken some important leaps forward this month!

As we go to press, a nominating committee has presented a slate
of candidates to members of the RING (our "governing"
conference) which will enable us to finally put our formal
organization in place. A draft set of bylaws has been written to
present to the IRS.

We also got our first *royalty* check from NewsNet this month.
This is exciting both because it is good for cash flow AND
because it reflects the fact that people are interested in
accessing NETWEAVER online!

One of the important benefits of ENA is what we are learning
about working via computer conferencing. After a year of
operation in our "electronic office" on UNISON we found
ourselves tangled in multiple conferences--active, inactive,
historic, false starts, and duplicates. This has been a highly
iterative process so it is not surprising that we have changed
conference structures several times to reflect changes in our
needs. Now we need to figure out what to *do* with all that
stuff! Some of it seems useful for "posterity" or for future
studies of online culture. Other pieces are of value to our
current work. Some conferences represent conversations overtaken
by the rolling present. We are in the process of thinking about
archiving, downloading, saving to disk or tape, deleting,
restructuring, printing, and all the other options for online
material. We are encountering all the issues related to saving
or not saving particular notes. We'll report on what we learn in
this process.

We have a team hard at work at creating an "ENA TOOLBOX" of
public domain programs which will be useful for networkers. We
hope to make this available as a membership benefit of ENA.
We're also planning to create a disk for sysops and SIG
coordinators which will make it easier to provide information
from ENA to your participants. You'll hear more about this
project in next month's issue of NETWEAVER, which will be a
Special Issue on LOCAL systems.

In this issue of NETWEAVER you'll find an in-depth interview
with Wendy Woods, editor and publisher of Newsbytes. There is
also a report from a conference on the use of computers in
social change organizations and notice of an upcoming
international conference. George Por reflects on some
implications for networkers of the nuclear accident at
Chernobyl. You're also invited to add your ideas to a summary of
key points of online etiquette contained in a RAND Corporation
Report.

Enjoy!