Volume 4, Number 10 ---CONTENTS--- October 1988


1 Masthead and Index

2 ENA UPDATE .................................by Lisa Kimball

Call for Proposals for ENA's next f-t-f conference in May '89!

3 FROM ELECTRONIC INSULARISM TO CONNECTED COMMUNITIES ..Part I
by Jeffrey Shapard

4 FROM ELECTRONIC INSULARISM TO CONNECTED COMMUNITIES ..Part II
by Jeffrey Shapard

5 A NYBBLE OF WINDOS .................. by (Ms.) Gail S. Thomas

6 COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK ........by Harry Stevens

COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK
by Harry Stevens

About 500 persons in September 1988 attended a three-day conference on
"Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)" sponsored by the Association
For Computing Machinery (ACM) with support from Lotus Development
Corporation and Xerox Corporation. Attendees came to Porland, OR from 27
states of the United States and from 16 countries. Only California (118),
Massachusetts (42), Texas (26), New Jersey (21), the host state of Oregon
(40), and the United Kingdom (21) had more attendees than Michigan (17).
Canada (13), Italy (13) and all the Sacandanavian countries (15) were well
represented, while Japan (2) and France (1) were much less in evidence
than they were in May 1988 at a conference of the Electronic Networking
Association (ENA) on "Beyond Electronic Mail: People and Organizations at
Work in a Global Economy."

As the names of these conferences' sponsors signify, while the earlier ENA
conference focused more on global nets, this ACM conference focused more
on physical nodes and local networks. This ACM/CSCW conference was
oriented more towards research than the ENA Conference had been. More
than twice as many CSCW attendees came from industry as from academia.
More than 20


came from government agencies,.and more than 10 represented trade
publications.

Both ENA and the CSCW theme took form about four years ago at organizing
meetings, which have been followed by two conferences for each being held
not annually but every other year. The CSCW conference organizer in
planning their next conference in 1990 was heard to say that she could
expect better quality papers with a two-year instead of an annual cycle.

While CSCW attendees for the most part take a scholarly approach to their
research, it is obvious that their view of group communication begins
mainly with the development of personal computers (PCs). When they study
technology supported groups, they tend to begin with the assumption that
there needs to be a continuum between how solo individuals work with
personal computers and how groups work. As a consequence, six different
rooms designed for group work that three companies and three universities
are currently experimenting with use full keyboards and individual screens
for from 4 to 24 persons meeting in each room.

These researchers show little awareness of earlier work with audience
response systems, student response systems, and group dialogue systems
that involve smaller hand-held terminals and only a large screen, which
these newer rooms also include. Perhaps work will soon begin on designing
just what groups can best use, and then the solo-to-group continuum can be
approached from both ends rather than starting always from the solo or PC
end.

This orientation to PCs naturally follows from how most current CSCW
attendees make their livings. Those coming from industry divide into
three groups of about equal size: computer hardware producers, software
producers, and what some might call groupware producers. This third group
would no doubt be surprised to be referred to as groupware producers.
Yet, they are the service providers, the consultants, the social
researchers, the managers, and the organizers who establish the protocols
that groups tend to follow, with or without the support of software and
hardware.

Middle managers of the past acted as bottlenecks in the flow of
information and decision-making in hierarchical organizations. There has
been a recent tendency to reduce layers of middle management. However,
there has also been a tendency to increase management staff positions. In
effect, many middle managers are becoming organizational staff specialists
or what might be called "middle organizers," who may just come to be seen
as transformed middle mangers using cotechnology in the 1990s to shape and
reshape group decision-making processes. Members of this third group from
within industry currently see themselves as more diverse than the other
two groups of hardware and software specialists respectively. Yet, they do
have in common the responsibility to shape group protocols or groupware.

During half of the four decades that computer hardware has been sold,
there were no separate software vendors. Software was originally sold
either bundled in with hardware or as a customized service where
consultants worked as programmers for hire temporarily until customized
software could be prepared to fit particular needs of each customer.
Today, even the more successful vendors incorporate service, training, and
consulting into their sales of hardware and software. Cotechnology or
groupware, to the extent that it becomes more than just another name for
group-oriented hardware or software, will, in its development decade(s) of
the 1990s and perhaps beyond, be sold mainly in the form of consulting,
training, and services that establish group protocols for cooperative
work. It will also be developed more in-house at first than by vendors.

The range of in-house developer to consultant to potential vendor of
cotechnology was well represented in the type of people who attended
CSCW'88 from Michigan where I live. The largest group came from the
Center for Machine Intelligence of the Electronic Data Systems division of
General Motors. While EDS technically can and does sell products outside
of GM, they view their current CSCW efforts as being mainly to provide
in-house services for GM in helping to reduce from five to three or less
years the time it takes to bring a new car model to market. The design of
their new CSCW room, which they call a Capture Lab, was described to the
conference.

The second largest group from Michigan came from the University of
Michigan, where they are planning soon to build a flexible CSCW room.
They are collaborating in this room's design not only with the largest
management consulting firm, Arthur Anderson, but also with the largest
vendor of office furniture, Steelcase, which is headquartered in Michigan.
As potential vendors of cotechnology in the 1990s, both Arthur Anderson
and Steelcase had representatives at CSCW'88.

The Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association
(BIFMA), like Steelcase, is located in Grand Rapids, which is also near
the next two largest vendors of office furniture, Herman Miller and
Haworth. BIFMA like the much smaller and more informal A3C3 represents
for Michigan an opportunity to take the lead in developing cotechnology
needed globally. It is likely that office furniture in the future will
have incorporated into it much of the communications and computer
technology needed to support group work. Chairs, desks, partitions, and
new components, will serve to form not only solo workstations but also
groupstations and environments supporting many-to-many communication,
collaboration, etc.

A NYBBLE OF WINDOS
by (Ms.) Gail S. Thomas

This article will provide a nybble of WinDOS. According to the
article, "Units of Storage," contained in the innovative Window Book,
WinDOS, a nybble is half as big as a byte, a group of four bits forming
half a byte. WinDOS serves not only as an example of the possible
applications of a technology, but also as a reference source in its own
right. WinDOS, an MS-DOS reference guide presented on a floppy disk,
utilizes the technology of the Window Book Authoring System, developed by
Box Company, Inc., 63 Howard Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

Drawing on the concept of hypertext, Window Book Technology facilitates
information storage and retrieval. Both French and English language
versions of the technology are currently available. Divided in two parts,
the technology consists of an authoring system for creating Window Books
and a presentation system for displaying Window Books. WinDOS serves both
as a practical demonstration of the presentation modules and as a
commercially available and immediately useful software product.

Recently I tried WinDOS Version 3.0, Text Version 3.21. The product falls
somewhere between the help file of a software program and a conventionally
printed and bound, weighty technical encyclopedia. Within that scope
WinDOS provides documentation for all DOS versions up to DOS 3.20.
According to Jeff Peoples of Window Book, Inc., a version encompassing DOS
3.30 is due in September 1988, and a version dealing with DOS 4.0 in
October 1988. The company also plans a Window Book on Lotus 1-2- 3
macros, release date not yet set. Suitable for use on PCs and
compatibles, the product requires DOS version 2.0 or later, 128K memory, a
double-sided disk drive and monochrome or color display. The product is
available on either 5.25 inch or 3.5 inch diskettes. Access to a printer
is recommended. For maximum quick reference convenience the product can
be installed on the hard drive. However, I also made use of the product
for reference and browsing on an IBM PC Convertible with two 3.5 inch disk
drives.

WinDOS is read on its own, not through a word processing program. Much as
in a conventional reference book, a detailed Table of Contents directs the
reader to a series of chapters treating topics ranging from DOS commands
to hard disk management techniques. A particularly intriguing feature
includes the "Jargon Index," a quick reference index listing
"Computerese," jargon, symbols, terms and abbreviations commonly
encountered in computing language, literature and textbooks. Effectively
the section on "Jargon" provides many of the computer terms the practicing
computerist always wanted to know about but probably never found the
opportunity to ask. Other topics in the "Jargon Index" include diskettes,
DOS names, DOS special symbols, file systems, input/output, and keyboard
terms.

So far WinDOS probably sounds like a reference book merely transferred to
a floppy disk and possibly installed on a hard disk drive. However, the
concept of associative reading sets WinDOS apart from a conventional
reference book or help file. A cross-reference function, referred to as
"CROSS-REF" in the software, allows the reader to choose articles closely
related to the material that he or she is already reading. While the
reader peruses any article contained in WinDOS, words within the article
leading to related articles are highlighted in blinking reverse video. At
any time while reading the article, the reader can find further
information on an "CROSS-REF" article by pressing the F1 key. The reader
structures the reference book to suit his or her needs.

In theory the associative reading procedure sounds rather like the
branching commonly found in computer-assisted instruction software
programs. In practice the associative reading procedure serves to provide
quick and thorough answers to computer related questions. For a simple
example, consider the concept of parking the hard disk. Suppose I want to
transport my PC X/T without risking damage to the data on the hard disk,
despite the existence of backup diskettes. From the Table of Contents of
WinDOS I choose the entry "Park." That choice gives me a short, specific
article summarizing and describing the use and function of the "Park"
command, as follows:

"SUMMARY. "PARK" removes the hard disk's read/write head to a safe
area so the disk can be moved without risking scratching an area
containing valuable information.

"DESCRIPTION. Physically moving your system may cause the hard
disk's read/write head to touch and possibly scratch the disk surface.
PARK moves the disk head to a safe location where there's no information
that could be lost; in other words, to a safely 'scratchable' location.
You then should turn the power off, to keep the head in that place,
because any further command you execute will simply move the head back to
some other--and damageable--location."

That relatively small entry contains vital information for anyone who owns
a PC with a hard disk. Even normally deskbound, larger-than-laptop PCs
get transported from one desk to another, or from one room to another.
Even access to that single reference could help prevent data loss. The
foregoing excerpt from WinDOS demonstrates the clarity and simplicity of
the explanations contained in the disk-book. For ease of reference the
program allows printing of individual articles. The printed articles
achieve a neat predetermined format, using the command and a short
explanation as a header, and a copyright notice as a footer.

Realistically the offline printing capacity constitutes both a strength
and a weakness of the product. For permanent reference, or for actually
utilizing a command or concept directly in DOS, the computerist needs to
either print out the desired selection or else make a note of the command
name, path or structure. The program can be made background resident,
always available by pressing a "hot key." However, it is difficult to
make the program truly background resident in the presence of another
shell or background program, such as the IBM Fixed Disk Organizer.
Otherwise, WinDOS provides crisply written, quickly accessed explanations
of commands and procedures associated with the theory and practice of
MS-DOS personal computing. A built-in tutorial gives computerists a
comprehensive orientation to the program.

**** Dr. Michael Spier, President of Box Company,
developed the Window Book technology. For information on Window Book
technology contact Mr. Jeff Peoples, President, Window Book, Inc., 63
Howard Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, 1-617-661-9515.

FROM ELECTRONIC INSULARISM TO CONNECTED COMMUNITIES
by Jeffrey Shapard
IEC/TWICS, Tokyo, Japan


I have one purpose in this short essay: to convince you of the need for
more internetworking to build bridges and connect our online communities.
We suffer from too much electronic insularism, partially due to simple
ignorance of the options already available, and partially due to insidious
policies by narrow-minded administrators struggling to maintain
centralization and control over your channels of communication. I will
discuss what I see as the problems, particularly as they regard the
domains of personal computers, computer conferencing, and commercial host
computer systems. Some of my opinions are rather strong, and if you would
like to step out back and discuss them further, my internetwork mail
address is listed in an afterward.

I am no expert on internetworking, as I have been buried too long in
centralized systems myself and have just begun to learn about the great
world beyond. While I frequently wander out through the routes we have
available on the public data networks and international packet switching
systems, and I have visited a few other centralized islands here and
there, these connections require that I go out from my own community and
join another, and learn yet another set of access procedures and commands,
and continue to journey out regularly in order to maintain any new
relationships I establish. It is a lot of work and time and expense.

I would like to give credit to some of the people who have helped me open
my eyes. Russ Briggs of DA Systems created DASnet [Briggs1987], a service
that does mail forwarding between all sorts of previously isolated
commercial systems, and he explores the often uncharted electronic seas
and helps us find routes to the people we want to communicate with. John
S. Quarterman of Texas Internet Consulting co-authored a seminal little
overview of internetwork connections [Quarterman1986] and is currently
buried deep in the rough draft of an incredibly comprehensive guide to the
mysteries of what he calls "The Matrix". Stephan Meyn of GMD nudged me
into joining him in exploring the fun we could have setting up an X.400
mail link (see [Boiardi1988ab] for an overview of X.400) to West Germany
for his organization's Tokyo office. And, Kenji Rikitake of TWICS and
Tokyo University keeps trying to educate me about protocols and convert me
to TCP/IP and 4.2BSD Unix. He is also involved in a variety of ongoing
internetworking experiments here on TWICS, at his university lab, with his
packet radio group, and late at night in his apartment. These guys are
doers, and I am going to talk about it.

Ignorance is widespread. While the academic and research communities in
computer and information science have been networking their increasingly
numerous host and workstation computers for years, and building gateways
between these networks, and while some of this valuable technology has
drifted out into major corporations and large organizations, the domains
of personal computer users and commercial host systems have been left
behind. Rather, they have not been paying enough attention to what is
going on elsewhere and have missed out on some good things.

With the significant exception of FidoNet bulletin boards and a few
progressive conferencing systems, this lack of internetworking is
especially prevalent in the personal computer world. How far would we have
come if all those mainframes of the 60s and minicomputers of the 70s and
supercomputers of the 80s been left standing isolated from the data and
resources of each other, let alone from the more precious human resources
of their various user communities? Yet, how many PCs are standing alone,
or even modemless, and how many PC users who do connect with others
through their machines ever go beyond a couple local BBSs or centralized
commercial e-mail or "information utility" systems? If you have access to
a FidoNet BBS, then at least you can exchange ideas with other people on
Fido boards elsewhere in that network and beyond, if you know the
gateways, all from the comfort and familiarity of your own local system.
And if you happen to run your own FidoNet BBS, then you can do this from
your own kitchen, or wherever you keep your machine.

Ignorance can be cured by watching and listening more closely, and this
will be easier to accomplish as information about networking becomes more
accessible, such as when John S. Quarterman's book gets published. And, if
you subscribe to a commercial system that is linked to DASnet, you can
expand your horizons immediately. However, a deeper problem lies in the
attitudes of the administrators of many centralized unconnected systems.

There seem to be more than just a few system administrators who do not
want any inter-connections between their systems and others, and another
way to look at this is to say that they don't want their users talking to
users of other systems, or vice versa. Therefore, if someone on such a
system wants to exchange mail with someone elsewhere, then she needs to go
elsewhere to do it. The inconvenience, trouble, and expense of doing this
thereby inhibit most such interaction, unless the need is great enough and
the relationship long-term enough to make it worth the ordeal. But this is
hardly compatible with the evolving organic social structures the media of
this new age of communications can support for us. System administrators
have several reasons for their anti-networking attitudes.

The first and most legitimate reason is security. A group or organization
may find it compatible with their goals to inhibit easy interaction and
information exchange between their members and people elsewhere. The
nature of what they are doing and trying to keep secure may possibly raise
other philosophical or political questions, but the point here is that
security is an important issue that the administrator or operator of every
computer system, including PCs, must confront and deal with. On the other
hand, how many organizations need to lock their people away in a lab
buried in a remote mountain, and cut them off from all contact with the
world beyond? The most important aspects of security are trust and an
awareness of what information should be kept secure and how to do it. A
burglar's best accomplice is someone who leaves their doors and windows
unlocked and their valuables lying around. Security begins and ends with
the users.

----

A second reason for lack of internetworking that I have heard given has to
do with control, and related aspects of reliability and responsibility.
One system administrator of a very large American commercial system told
me that their gang of lawyers warned them that they might be held
responsible for any trouble delivering electronic mail through
internetworks, and they felt that they could only guarantee reliability if
they controlled all the connections themselves. So, the users of that
system cannot exchange messages with people elsewhere. Another very large
American commercial system has implemented an electronic mail gateway with
a very large electronic mail service, but refuses a smaller operation the
right to offer a similar service to their subscribers.

A third reason, I charge, is economic hegemonism. Administrators of large,
centralized systems may see internetwork connections as a threat, since
people might be able to get an account on some cheap little local
conferencing system, or even a neighborhood BBS, yet be able to exchange
mail with their paying customers. They have big investments in their
centralized facilities and services, and they hope to protect them by
forcing anyone who wants access to any part of them to pay for it
directly. The problem here is that someone who just wants to be able to
send mail to someone on, say, GEnie or CompuServe, may not really have any
need or desire to pay sign-up and subscription fees to get access to all
the other interesting things these services offer. Imagine if you could
only send letters to people in Paris if you rented an apartment there, or
you could only call people in Tokyo if you paid a big deposit for a
telephone number there.

A fourth reason is that network gateways and links can be a lot of work to
set-up and maintain. As a system administrator myself, I know how hard it
is to look objectively at anything that is going to add more work to what
is already an tremendous burden. The most difficult part of an
internetwork connection is billing, but there is also a lot of work that
needs to be done to integrate internetwork gateways with various
electronic mail and conferencing software to make it more transparent and
easier to use. At the Electronic Networking Association conference in May,
1988, the developers of the CAUCUS, CoSy and PARTICIPATE conferencing
software met and agreed on the need to work together to develop a way to
network between their systems.

While certain very large commercial systems continue their insular
policies, and while others reach out and link up with fellow giants,
smaller systems look to their neighbors and to friends like DASnet. You
might already be a subscriber to a system that has a DASnet link, and this
means that today you can exchange mail with an estimated 3 million people.
Some smaller systems are networking directly with like-minded partners,
such as the hourly links between Peacenet/Econet in California and
GreenNet in London. Other systems are connecting up to some of the large
existing non-commercial networks, for example, The Well's link to UUCP,
which is an incredibly widespread and anarchic cooperative network of Unix
systems, and even some PC users are running software such as UUPC that
lets their machines run the protocols they need to become nodes.

Consider this scenario. You wake up in the morning, and after the first
cup of coffee, you turn on some music and wander over to your PC to check
your mail. During the night, your trusty tool and window to the world has
automatically logged in to your favorite BBSs, a local conferencing system
community, and one large unavoidable information utility you can't seem to
get to any other way, and it has forwarded outgoing messages and picked up
messages and inbox listings for you to deal with when you have time. You
scan through them, noticing that some of the BBS messages and conferencing
system notes have come from systems in other parts of the world.

Some of your online friends never deal with any system beyond their own
desktop PC, and have everything mailed right in through the networks, but
you like the old-time community feeling of some BBSs and conferencing
systems, and you keep accounts open on them and even login by hand once in
awhile, when you have time. Then, you tell your PC to check your office
system. (Since you use this line both for personal and business use, and
for voice and data, your office system doesn't forward mail on to you
directly, as it does for some of your colleagues who work at home several
days a week. Also, you are very security conscious, so you prefer to
monitor calls into your office system.)

When you are done, and have had breakfast, you ride your bicycle to your
office, and after greeting your colleagues, you sit down at your desk and
turn on your workstation. It is connected to a local area network, and you
have an electronic mail and conferencing system installed on a node
somewhere. You think it is within your office somewhere, but it may be in
the office across town.

You can exchange messages with anyone in your company, and with just about
anyone else online, right from your desk, and you are engaged in a project
team with a half dozen other people now. Only three of them are in your
company and on your company's network, and only one of them is in your
town. The others are on systems elsewhere, but this is transparent -- you
are all in the same conference -- and talking to them is as easy as
talking to the people in your office's Friday night planning conference,
which is a little underground activity you use for unofficial quality
control and personnel morale. You check your inbox, let the notes for some
topics wait, read your personal messages, look in to see what is happening
in your project team conference, send a message to someone in Finland,
laugh at a joke sent by someone from Indonesia, and get to work in your
connected community.

How much of this have you implemented already? Some people are already
here, or far beyond. Talk to your local system administrator and ask them
what they are doing about it.

One extreme position is to abandon all central hosts, and each person's PC
will be their own window to the world. But many of us like the sense of
'place' we get when we login and visit some particular system, and most
individual PC users are not willing to dedicate a phone line just for
receiving calls to receive mail on their computer. It is more convenient
and appropriate, and usually more economical, to use a local host computer
for electronic mailboxes and conferencing. The ideal situation is to be
able to enjoy the familiarity of your favorite system while being able to
exchange messages and join group discussions with people anywhere.

If you have never exchanged messages with someone in an electronic
community beyond the one(s) you have immediate access to, I hope that you
will sit back and think about the possibilities this can open up for you,
personally or professionally. The tools we have can do so much, but no
more than what our imaginations demand of them. Put yours to work.

Citations: ---------

Boiardi, Ruben. 1988a.
X.400: What is it? Part I. Netweaver, Feb '88, 4:2:7.

Boiardi, Ruben. 1988b.
X.400: What is it? Part II. Netweaver, Mar '88, 4:3:6.

Briggs, Russ. 1987.
Parallel Conferences. Netweaver, Mar '89, 3:3:7-8.

Quarterman, John S., and Josiah C. Hoskins. 1986.
Notable Computer Networks.
Communications of the ACM, Oct '86, 29:10:pp932-971.


Afterword: --------- Jeffrey Shapard is a die-hard Montanan now living and
working in Tokyo, where he operates a conferencing system called TWICS. Is
is also the Moderator of ENA. He can be reached as Jefu@DCTWCS.DAS.NET
through DASnet from a system near you.

ENA UPDATE
by Lisa Kimball

The 1989 ELECTRONIC NETWORKING ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE will be held May
25-28, 1989 in Allentown Pennsylvania, USA. You're invited to submit
proposals for sessions, workshops, and meetings to be held during the
conference.

This year, the ENA conference will be organized around a broad range of
themes. You can submit proposals in any of the following theme areas:

APPLICATIONS ARENAS: (including theory & research, case
studies, the technology edge, and issues and future opportunities)

Education/Learning
Organization/Management
Small Business/Entrepreneurship
Nonprofit/Independent Sector
Public Service/Government

INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVES: (from the points of view of
individual users, product developers, system owners and operators, and
professionals/consultants)

Technology Future
Markets/Economics
Law/Policy
Global Environment

You can submit your proposals electronically by sending them to me or ask
the porter on your home system to forward your proposal to ENA. You can
also send your proposal to: LISA KIMBALL, Metasystems Design Group, Inc.,
2000 North 15th Street, Suite 103, Arlington, VA 22201 (call
703-243-6622). Your proposal should include a brief description of your
idea, how it relates to the theme topics of the conference, and the nature
of the session (e.g. workshop, panel discussion, case-study). Your
proposal will be forwarded to the organizer for the appropriate
theme/track. Please include mail and phone contact information because
theme organizers have been drawn from many different online systems and
may not be able to contact you here. Proposals are due December 1, 1988.

Early Bird registration fees for the conference will be $250 (discounts
appl5~for ENA members). Speakers may attend the conference on the day of
their presentation for free and receive a substantial discount on full
conference fees.

The conference will be held at Muhlenberg College, Allentown,
Pennsylvania. Allentown is located 90 miles due west of New York city and
60 miles due north of Philadelphia. Allentown is part of a metro area of
approximately 600,000 people. The city is served by the ABE Airport which
is 15 minutes drive from the college campus. ABE has flights provided by
11 major and regional airlines. Muhlenberg is a liberal arts college
situated on a campus about one mile from center city Allentown. The
college is adjacent to a portion of the City's park system that includes
Lake Muhlenberg and the Rose Gardens. During most of the conference days
the City will be having May Days, an arts and music festival in the parks
near the college. Accommodations will be available at the college for very
reasonable rates for those on a tight budget and at the nearby Hilton
Hotel.

See you in Allentown in May!