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ETD News - December 1998
Page 3 of 3
Telework Education Initiative Launched
In October, the Washington-based International Telework Association and Council (ITAC) launched a comprehensive programme for telework education. The year long programme will provide employers in organisations throughout the USA with information and tools to "jump-start" telework programs.
A related planned activity is Telework America Day, that will take place on Wednesday, October 27, 1999 when millions of American workers will demonstrate the benefits of telework by working from home or a telework centre.
Telework `98
The European Commission's status report on European TeleworkDGXIII's fourth telework yearbook: Telework `98 is now available at the European Telework Web site http://www.eto.org.uk/twork/tw98. It provides country by country status reports, summaries of projects, and discussion of policy and market developments. Annexes provide a wealth of detailed information on projects, resources, publications and contacts.
The hard-copy version can be obtained free of charge from:
Maarten Botterman,
The European Commission, DGXIII-B
Rue de la Loi 200
ACTS Central Office
BU-9 4/82
B-1049 Brussels, Belgium.
Tel +32 2 296 3415
Fax +32 2 295 0654
Email aco@bxl.dg13.cec.be
WISE
WISE - the Work, Information Society and Employment Forum has been launched as an independent private, non-profit making international association. It builds on the work of ACTS Project DIPLOMAT: The European Charter for Telework (AC223), an initiative described in earlier editions of ETD News, along with support from other ACTS projects (particularly ETD and ACTSLINE). It held a briefing during European Telework Week in Brussels on 6 November 1998.
The aims and objectives of WISE are:
- To provide an informed, neutral environment
for people concerned with employment, including national, regional and local
government, trade
unions, employers, trade associations and social partners, to debate
work and employment aspects of the Information Society.
- To develop policy advice for government, employers and other market actors
on the future socio-economic developments of the Information Society.
- To act independently in all aspects of information gathering, research,
conclusions and advice.
- To be international; inviting research, contributions and participation
from people and organisations throughout the world, reflecting the importance
of global and trans-border aspects of telework and tele-business.
- To receive and respond to feedback and information from major organisations, political and industrial leaders and informed individuals from around the World.
To complement these aims WISE will provide a number of platforms and services to enable dialogue and for discussion and evaluation of employment programmes and initiatives. A particular focus will be consensus building on labour relations and work organisation.
Mr Lacina, former Minister for Finance in the Austrian government, has agreed to be the first President of the WISE Forum. He will invite key people from the list of 600+ influential signatories to the European Charter for Teleworking to become Partners, Members, or Sponsors of the Forum and take an active role.
Contact - Josef Hochgerner
Email: j.hochgerner@magnet.at
WWW: http://www.wise-forum.org
Tel: +43 1 4950442
Fax: +43 1 4950442-40
News from ACTS
MULTICUBE - Service for the Virtual EnterpriseThe final workshop of ACTS project MULTICUBE took place in Turin on 24th September. The project has explored broadband network solutions supporting collaborative design through one year of trials involving three automotive and three aerospace organizations with design centres scattered across Europe. The focus of the final workshop was the need to provide industrial users with new services exploiting the guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) in telecommunications. Copies of presentation material can be found at:
http://www.cselt.it/sonah/MULTICUBE/
ACTS at IBC'98
Over 20 ACTS projects involved in the development of interactive multimedia demonstrated their results during IBC98 in September. Technologies demonstrated included 3D acquisition, virtual studio, audio and video restoration, home storage, shared virtual worlds, telepresence and tele-manipulation.
ASIS: Alliance for a Sustainable Information Society
ASIS (Alliance for a Sustainable Information Society) aims to demonstrate how best to support the objectives of sustainability through use of information and communications technologies. It sees the information society as "the next step along the path towards a fair, fulfilling, prosperous and sustainable world". Sustainability is described as development that meets the need of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their needs. The reason for the formation of the Alliance is that it believes that achieving sustainability requires concerted action from many organisations working collaboratively. It will therefore seek wide participation from influential public and private organisations.
The ASIS project, of 14 partners, provides an initial framework for the Strategic Alliance. Its first activity is to investigate how results from existing ACTS projects can be used to contribute to the achievement of a Sustainable Information Society. The results of this investigation will lead to recommendations for specific actions.
ASIS invites ACTS participants to join the ASIS Strategic Alliance.
Contact - Dr. Klaus Tochtermann
Email: tochterm@faw.uni-ulm.de
ASIS website: http://asis.jrc.es
EPRI-Watch is an ACTS project that promotes the use of advanced communications services by European politicians, and especially members' national parliaments and the European Parliament. After a period of extensive trials to iron out any compatibility problems, the first teleconference took place on Wednesday 2 October. The trial involved ISDN interconnections linking the Committee on Social Affairs of the European Parliament with those of the National Parliaments of four member-states: Austria, Germany, Greece and Finland. Videoconferencing facilities of two types were used - large dedicated systems and PC desktop based systems.
Such an interconnection provides tele-conferencing and tele-collaboration capabilities that should prove particularly valuable for encouraging cooperation between Standing Committees of each Parliament concerned with the European Union.
Telemedicine demonstrations over ATM
The EXPO'98 Telemedicine Conference, held in Lisbon during September, provided the setting for demonstrations by the ACTS project EMERALD (European Multimedia Services for Medical Imaging). Connections were made between the Hospital Príncipe de Asturias (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid) and the Portugal Telecom premises at EXPO'98. Services shown included videoconferencing, computer supported co-operative work, remote data base access, and image visualisation and processing. The applications used IP over ATM with 8 Mbps guaranteed bandwidth.
Does Telepresence increase travel?
David Leevers, from the ACTS projects CICC and ASIS (see Newsclip above), writes about the commercial case for telepresence and shared virtual environments (SVE) in the latest ACcenTS magazine. While he notes that the case for SVE is often argued on reduced travel costs, he argues that telepresence technologies make it easier to support remote working relationships and therefore may actually stimulate increased travel. It catalyses the creation of "global networked communities that are independent of traditional national and cultural loyalties."
The newsletter also reports that companies such as Daimler-Benz, Porsche and BMW are using virtual reality in earnest, as an essential tool in their industrial processes. At BMW, for example, it is used to analyse the results of crash tests. The computer model used allows users to open up individual components and inspect the nature of the internal damage. However, there are still problems to be resolved with the user interface in VR environments - how to precisely manipulate objects in virtual environments, providing a consistent framework for interaction, and the use of body-relative pull-down menus.
The ACcenTS newsletter may be downloaded from the ACTS Newsclip website. It is available in two versions - Full text with pictures (24 pages) - 4.3 Mbytes; text without pictures - 200 kBytes.
E-clip: Legalising electronic commerce.
Many observers believe that electronic commerce in Europe will not really take off until the legal framework is clearer. A group of European universities have created E-clip (Electronic Commerce Legal Issues Platform), a competency centre to assist EU projects on such issues. Interested projects can seek assistance though accessing the E-Clip web site:
http://www.uni-muenster.de/eclip
Making SMEs competitiveAt a conference held in Thessaloniki in September, ACTS project BOURBON showed how it had been helping SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) across Europe get access to cost effective advanced telematics services. A testbed in Sligo, Ireland allows local companies to connect to fast services over ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), which uses ordinary telephone copper wires. In Finland, examples were described of how advanced telecommunications technology is used in the printing and publishing industry.
Internet commerce - are you prepared?A survey conducted in the Benelux countries, for the 4th Internet in Business Event in Amsterdam in September, finds that 58 per cent of companies believe that the Internet "has little or nothing to offer to their business". Hence the organisers urged managers to `stop burying their heads in the sand' and to 'be curious'. The event included 180 trade booths as well as expert seminars on electronic payment, electronic purchasing, security and law and the Internet. Interesting exhibits included live television over the Internet with the first Dutch Internet-station (by 2PR Holding), and the translation and sending of html-documents into standard EDI-formats (by BeCom Digital).
ACTs Annual ReportThe 1998 report of ACTS projects will soon be published. Peaking at some 200 projects, the ACTS programme is now entering its final phase. Each ACTS project summarises in a page their achievements and plans for the completion of their project. The report prefaces the synopses with a positive review of the benefits of ACTS and its predecessor RACE. It cites the benefit of collaboration and common standards. Whereas Europe's GSM technology opened up mass-markets for mobile communications, the digital broadcasting standards of DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) could have a similar effect on customer accessilbitiy to a wide range of programming material from multiple sources.
Satellite-terrestrial services interoperabilityA set of trials by ACTS project INSURED has demonstrated the feasibility of integrating Satellite-UMTS (S-UMTS) services with terrestrial systems. The new generation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, such as the Iridium network, allows location independent working on a truly global scale. The trials validated the seamlessness of handover from satellite to terrestrial circuits. The trial foresees the development of dual mode terminals or handsets that can interoperate on both systems using appropriate segments of each according to availability and cost.
Source: ACTS Newsclips, Nos. 54-55:
http://www.at.infowin.org/ACTS/IENM/NEWSCLIPS/
A full list of ACTS projects can be found at:
http://www.infowin.org/ACTS/RUS/PROJECTS/
Forthcoming Events
Events relating to telework, teletrade and telecooperation, are online at: http://www.eto.org.uk/events/ where there is an open service for event organisers.
European Telework Online (ETO):
http://www.eto.org.uk
In October ETO site clocked around 15,000 separate user visits during and a total of over 100,000 individual `hits'. Once again Italy was the most visited national page and in return the Italian website was the source of most referrals to rest of the site. Most national pages were among the top 30% in terms of page requests.
Visitors to the site from outside Europe included a very large number apparently from USA (but probably including a lot of EU Compuserve, AOL etc users), significant numbers from Australia, Canada, Japan and a few regular users from countries such as China, Chile, India and Peru. The 14 EU countries excluding Luxembourg all featured in the top 18 countries, alongside USA, Canada, Australia and Japan.
Recent additions to the website include:
- http://www.eto.org.uk/nat/bg/ - new release of Bulgaria pages
- http://www.eto.org.uk/nat/ca/ - a new national page for Canada
- http://www.eto.org.uk/nat/cz/ - a new national page for the Czech Republic
- http://www.eto.org.uk/leadernet/ - the European LEADER Observatory
European Telework Online is a member of the Telework Week WebRing. A WebRing is a collection of pages and/or sites that fit together through a common theme, all joined by HTML code that sets up the ring. Each site in the ring connects to two adjacent sites, although it is sometimes possible to get sight of (and connect to!) other sites further round the ring.
Sites in the Ring at the start of European Telework Week were:
http://www.eto.org.uk - European Telework Online: the European and International focal point for information, news and discussion on Telework, Teletrade and Telecooperation.
http://www.etw.org - European Telework Week. Information about ETW and Telework Awards.
http://www.ciberteca.es/aet/ - Asociación Española de Teletrabajo - Spanish Telework. Web site of the Spanish Telework Association.
http://www.telework.de - Telework Competence Centre. A non-commercial platform for information and know-how exchange. Also hosts webpages for the newly created German Telework Association (VTD).
http://www.telework.ie - Telework Ireland. The association of teleworkers and the voice of professional teleworking in Ireland.
http://euroteletravail.gramme.be - Institut Gramme EUROTELETRAVAIL. Telework site of l'Institut Gramme (Hemes, Belgique).
http://www.cyberguide.net/tw.asp - Cyberguide Télétravail. Information on conferences etc.
http://www.workplaceforum.com/member/ - The Workplace Forum. Concerning the design and management of the workplace.
http://www.netzforum.de - Hessen teleworking. This hosted an Internet conference during the European teleworking week ´98 from the province of Hessen.
http://www.telelavoro.it - European Telework Week in Italy. The Italian Website dedicated to the European Telework Week.
http://www.telework.at - An Austrian telework web site.
Start at any one of these and you will soon get to another! A similar telework ring is in operation in the USA and Canada. The rings are interlinked through many cross linkages from one telework website to another. Telework is indeed making the world seem smaller. To submit a site for consideration of inclusion in the ring, complete the submission form at:
http://www.eto.org.uk/forms/ringsub.htm
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