THE ELECTRONIC COMPENDIUM
Integrating CC and F-T-F
by Roger Bunting


One of the great potentials of computer conferencing is its capability for linking thoughtful dialogue, especially for achieving clarity of concepts and ideas. A powerful dimension of that capability is that it can provide a bridge between face- to-face meetings and online conversations, *and* support the publication of an electronic compendium which captures the essence and flow of the dialogue. This article is about a recent experience in which CC was used to provide such a bridge and produce an electronic compendium.

Over the last Fourth of July weekend, there was a f-t-f meeting of a group of 75 persons who were invited to attend the Third Annual Symposium on Organizational Transformation (OT3). It was held at the Hyatt Regency resort complex in Monterey, California. It was also "attended" by several people who were hundreds and even thousands of miles from Monterey, and it has been continued since the Independence Day weekend both online and via paper-copy input by the attendees.

Less than a month after the f-t-f meeting, a bound copy of the Interim Version of an Electronic Compendium was in the hands of the attendees, including those who had participated electronically. Additional input (comments on previous material, new ideas, announcements, etc.) has been solicited from the attendees and participants. The Final Version of an Electronic Compendium of the symposium, integrating the f-t-f, online, and paper-copy input will have been published and distributed by the time this article in online.

This meeting beyond time and space and the publication of an electronic compendium of its proceedings have been made possible by the interactive capability of computer conferencing, the user-friendliness of laptop portable computers, and the fact that the CC medium results in a written record of the discussions.

The process actually began a couple of months prior to the f-t-f meeting. Several discussion items were placed in the Meta:OT conference on The Meta Network, both announcing the plans for the f-t-f meeting and continuing the dialogue about the practice of OT which had begun prior to OT1 in the spring of 1983. Those items and the subsequent online responses to them were downloaded and posted on the wall of the conference room in which the initial plenary session of the Monterey symposium was held.

Attendees at the f-t-f meeting were told that the meeting was being extended to the online community, and they were encouraged to participate in the process of documenting what occurred during their f-t-f sessions and sharing it with the online "attendees" so the latter could participate in the dialogue. An inducement to do this was the fact that they could also get an exposure to the technologies of computer-assisted word-processing and telecommunications. Many of the OT3 symposium attendees had little or no previous hands-on experience with computers of any kind, or were just beginning to use their own recently-acquired personal computers.

An Operations Center was established in a hospitality suite at the resort hotel. Located there were a desk-top computer equipped with printer and 1200 bps modem, and several TRS80 Model 100 computers belonging to the Meta Network staff members. Those laptop computers were used by some of staff who attended various the on-site discussion sessions and recorded what occurred in written summaries in the Model 100s. Some of the laptop computers were kept available in the Operations Center for other people who had either conducted or attended the on- site sessions, to use for preparing their own reports of what had occurred in the sessions, and their reactions to them.

The draft reports prepared in the Model 100s during the day were uploaded to the desktop computer (at 9600 bps) using the Telecommuter file-transfer program. They were then edited and formatted, if necessary, and further uploaded (at 1200 bps), through the telephone in the room, via a local Telenet access node, to the host computer of The Meta Network in Michigan. The reports were posted, as early in the evening as possible, on the Meta:OT conference for viewing by the online participants.

The attendees were told that each day, the new input from the Meta:OT conference, contributed during the previous night, would be posted on the plenary-session bulletin board, so they could see what comments were coming in from the off-site participants. Each morning, the new input from the online participants was downloaded and printed using the printer in the Operations Center. It was then posted on the bulletin board prior to the beginning of the morning plenary session. A simple form was made available to facilitate the on-site attendees' preparation of their hand-written responses to the online comments. The on-site attendees were encouraged to use either those forms (and to drop them off at the Operations Center) or the laptop computers which were available in the Operations Center.

[An interesting dimension of the process was the extent to which it enabled many of the on-site attendees to have their first hands-on experience with a computer, albeit the simple but very user-friendly TRS80 Model 100. The latter was found to be particularly useful for this purpose.

Once turned on and in the TEXT program, it could be handed to a person who had never before operated a computer. With a very few instructions, the person was soon typing away, making corrections, "cutting and pasting" text, and using the straightforward text-processing capabilities of the Model 100 to prepare a draft report.

This risk-free and purposeful exposure to computers convinced many people who had been avoiding them that there was nothing all that threatening about them and that they could proceed to embrace the technology without further anxiety.]

A staff member transcribed the hand-written comments and uploaded those prepared on the Model 100s into the desktop computer, for uploading to the Meta:OT online conference. (In some cases, the modems in the Model 100s were used to directly upload the text to the host computer.) This process provided the linkage between the on-site attendees and the online participants, and enabled the dialogue between them to be carried on during the four days of the conference.

Following the f-t-f meeting, it was then a simple matter to download all of the OT3 discussion items and their related responses, print them, and have them copied, bound, and mailed out to all of the attendees (most of whom do not have access to terminals or PCs) and to the online participants. That Interim Version of the Electronic Compendium was comprised of over 60 pages of text containing 34 different discussion items and their responses. Further input was solicited after the readers had the opportunity to consider the totality and integration of the session descriptions, responses to them, and the exchanges which occurred between the on-site attendees and the online participants. That further input was provided either via written responses on a form mailed into the staff and again uploaded onto the online conference, or by the online participants providing their input online in the Meta:OT conference.

The process achieved integration of a face-to-face meeting, the concurrent and subsequent discussion made possible by computer conferencing, and the use of written copy and postal mail. The final product is a publication with a great deal of richness, depth, and, of all things, humanness, reflecting the earnest, usually well-reasoned, and sometimes emotional, dialogue between people sharing a common interest but different opinions on a subject area. It is an example of the kind of bridge which electronic networking can provide between the face-to-face and online communities, a further step toward achieving a sense of unity within our human groups.

Imagine how the process could be used to extend and enrich the countless meetings occurring every day throughout the business community, within governmental bodies, and in organizations and networks all over the world!

Who knows? It may even be used at the ENA f-t-f conference in Washington, D.C., the theme of which is

Using the Medium!

-----

Further information about the process used in the preparation of an
electronic compendium can be obtained from the author at Metasystems
Design Group, Inc., 177 Webster Street, #3701, Monterey, CA 93940, (408)
373-7638, on The Meta Network or Unison ENA conferences (Roger Bunting),
The Source (STJ216), or CompuServe (71656,1134).