Note following 23 October 1996 GA Chains Group Meeting

At the European Telework Development Initiative website
ACTS Telework Chain (GAT: General Access - Telework)

Note on Chains Concertation and Communications

A note by Horace Mitchell, European Telework Development Initiative (ACTS Project AC223). I hope this will be useful input to the GAT meeting on 4 November and a background to GAT representation at the Concertation Management meeting in Brussels on 4 November.

1. The need for action

The present mechanism where occasional meetings are the main focus for activity and provision of direction has resulted in very slow progress. If anything is to be achieved we need to fix three specific problems:

1. Lack of visibility of work-in-progress and outcomes of Chains

Most projects are in several chains and could contribute to others, but contributions will mainly come from people not projects. So people who are interested need to be able to very readily find out what is happening where and to "join in" or comment.

2. Very poor communications to, from and across Chains

The process appears to be hierarchical - to chairs and supposedly through them to projects; from chains through chairs to ??whom?? There is no reason to suppose the person who happens to be chair is a good communications mechanism and absolutely no reason for risking that the chair may be an ineffective filter or a bottleneck. The chairs are busy people they need to know who is seeing what but not get in the way or have to engage in admin working as a postbox. We need a mechanism whereby anyone who wants to know can find out but those who don't need to know are not burdened.

3. Problems with scheduling and calendars

The calendar at InfoWin appears to be one placed there in June 1996. We need a visible calendar that can be maintained directly by those who fix dates of meetings, to which agendas can readily be attached, and with a convenient facility for "registration of intention to attend" and "registration of interest in receiving outputs".

4. Ease of presentation to wider audiences

All chains need to be able to connect with wider audiences as they reach the stage where Guidelines etc need wider review and comment. For each chain to be left handling this individually with no central "connection point" simply means that many interested parties will never get to hear about things.

2. Proposed solution

The obvious and easy solution is Internet, with a judicious combination of email and www facilities. This can be implemented centrally with a minimum of effort, so that Chains can either use the central facility or their own equivalents, according to resources and taste. The underpinnings are there in the InfoWin project, all we need is a little "tweaking" based on experience within Chains.

GAT has been exploring this and I believe the approach we are now using will at least be a significant improvement on the present situation. Its described briefly below and can be seen in action at the GAT site (though there will not be much content in some aspects since much of the implementation is new).

Visibility of work in hand:
All working papers from all Chains should be on the web and indexed. Today its as easy to produce a paper "for the web" as it is to produce a word processed document or an ascii file. As a matter of principle ACTS should adopt a "web first" philosophy so that all new documents are automatically available on line as soon as created and other forms are only produced "as needed".
Papers can be anywhere on the web so long as there is an index at the chain level and a link to the index centrally. Some could be on InfoWin and indexed at InfoWin, some could be at a Chain's own secretariat or rapporteur site (as currently with GAT) some could be at a project's or even an individual's site - wherever its easiest for the "owner" of the paper. If Chains are to use InfoWin they need ftp access to maintain their own pages.
If each Chain looks after its own indexing there is no additional work for InfoWin.
Communications
This should use self-maintaining email lists (listserv):
1. Each chain should have an "open" list, where anyone interested in the work of that chain can self-enroll. See http://www.eto.org.uk/gat/info.htm for an example of this. Any "new news" of specific interest to that Chain can be sent as a single email message to this list and will automatically reach all interested parties.
2. Each chain group should have a similar list. Only those having an interest in concertation matters at the chain group level need to enroll, but anyone with such an interest can choose to do so.
3. The overall concertation process should have a similar list, again only those having an interest in concertation matters at the ACTS programme level needs to enroll.
  If projects want to make sure they don't miss anything they can arrange for nominated individuals to enroll in all appropriate lists and to reflect to the project what they discover. People with wide interests and who don't mind receiving more mail can join several lists. People who don't want to receive mail can avoid lists. See below for how such people can access news.
4. Each email list should be reflected to a www page so that all its messages, in sequence, can be seen by people who don't want to receive many emails but do want to be able to check out what is happening and what has happened. See http://www.eto.org.uk/gat/list/ for an example of this.
Review and comments on Guidelines
When a guideline or working paper is on the web, the Internet technology can easily be used to receive and display comments. Each document seeking comments has embedded in it a "mailto" button which, instead of sending the mail to a person, displays it at a www page. The owner/editor of the document can see all the comments, but so can everyone else. This is "open peer review" and is beginning to be used for online scientific journals.
Scheduling
We haven't yet implemented this at the GAT pages but like all the other functions its relatively easy to do. As at 24 Oct the InfoWin calendar is a static table carrying the rubric:
Table prepared by Nick Heenan and converted to hypertext format by Hill Stewart on 14 June 1996

In other words the information is June 1996 information - not much good in October 1996.
As a matter of urgency we need a dynamic not a static calendar - in other words one where anyone setting up a meeting or changing it can readily insert the details or change what is there. To do this without human intervention (like all the items proposed above) is probably a programing job at present, but we can minimise the human intervention needed by InfoWin and make it as easy as possible for the person who owns the meeting by using a web form to collect the relevant data and present it to the InfoWin webmaster in "ready to use" form. Another button linked to each event can be used to "register" or "register and interest", or the calendar entry can be linked to the appropriate website for further details.

These are I think the main things that will improve the Chains and Guidelines process, cost nothing, and demonstrate commitment. ACTS needs to be a showcase for sensible use of this technology, at present we are looking very amateur in our use of it. Lets work together to fix that now!

Horace Mitchell
European Telework Development Initiative
October 24th 1996.

Any comments on this note please address to Christian Van Asbroeck (GAT Secretariat)

ACTS Telework Chain Index Page

European Telework Development Initiative - Home Page

Page address http://www.eto.org.uk/gat/agendas/note2810.htm
Last updated 30 October 1996