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06 November 1997


October 1997 ECTC Status Report

by Randall Severy <severy@asi.org>

The Electronic Communications Technical Committee maintained the increased level of activity in October that had begun the previous month. A lot of activity took place in the ASI Web Team, where two of the Web Team projects kicked into high gear. The Web Team projects were the focus of the October ECTC IRC Meeting, where the project teams assigned project leaders and added several new volunteers. During the IRC meeting, and in an announcement later in the month, the use of "ICQ" was recommended for real-time communication among the ECTC membership. By the end of the month, eight ECTC members were using ICQ on a regular basis.

The ASI mailing lists received a big boost last month when Bobby Will took over full responsibility for the ASI mailing lists as the new ASI "Listmaster". One of Bobby's first tasks was to create a new ASI mailing list, asi-list-owners@asi.org, specifically for the owners of all of the ASI mailing lists. A lot of activity continued to take place on the ASI web site, especially as a result of the Web Team Missing Links and MMM projects. The WebSite Director software that maintains the web site was commercially released in October, and the software on the web site was upgraded to the commercial version. A proposal by Tim Cadell for ASI committee logos for use in the news pages sparked a lengthy discussion about logos for the ECTC and the Web Team.

The ECTC membership stayed at about the same number in October, adding one more member than it lost. Brian Cesar rejoined the group after a brief absence to switch over to a new e-mail address. Greg Garber and Tom Wheeler joined and volunteered to help with some of the Web Team activities. And Noel Friesen and Joelle Cowan rounded out the new additions to the team. On the departing list, James Leveque and Russ Myrick were removed from the mailing list when e-mail to them started bouncing. And Morris Middleton and GJ Bart decided to spend their time elsewhere. At the end of October, the ECTC had 22 active members, with another 47 people in the Observer or Rep categories. You can find the complete ECTC membership listing, which now includes ICQ numbers, at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html. With the small number of active members, there is a lot of room for new volunteers for ECTC tasks. If you would like to join the ECTC and help with any of those tasks, you can use the form on the ECTC task list page at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc_tasks.html.

Here is the latest status information from the individual work areas within the ECTC:

Help Desk

Nanci Brasket continued manning the Comm and Info Center. Tim Cadell completed the first version of the New Volunteer Interview System, which is now being installed on the ASI web site. Joelle Cowan volunteered to help keep an eye on entries in the web site Guestbook.

Listserver Mailing Lists

Bobby Will began his new role of ASI Listmaster by setting up a new ASI mailing list, asi-list-owners@asi.org. The new list proved invaluable only a short time later when it was used to pass around a warning about a new mailbomb attack on the ASI mailing lists. The same mailbomber tried again near the end of the month and some configuration changes are being proposed for the ASI mailing lists to cut down on future mailbomb attacks. Bobby updated the configuration for two ASI mailing lists, art-tourism and art-3d, to reflect changes in the ownership of the lists. An effort to update the master list of ASI mailing lists was started, involving Darrell Thompson, Greg Bennett, and Bobby Will.

World Wide Web Server

The WebSite Director software that is used to maintain the ASI web site (as the ASI Web System) was commercially released on October 10, and the commercial version was installed on the ASI web site soon afterwards. The Web System was used extensively throughout the month as a record volume of updates entered the system as a result of the Web Team Missing Links and MMM projects. By the end of the month, over 100 update requests were being processed in the Web System, which appeared to be handling the volume without any problems. The web server that hosts the ASI web site and the ASI Web System, however, continued to have severe response time problems throughout the month, despite an attempt by IO to offload activity from the web server machine. As part of those attempts to improve the web server performance, the ASI overnight jobs were moved to a different machine, which resulted in two separate outages of the overnight jobs during the month.

During October, a total of 56 updates were published to the ASI web site, including 25 new documents, 28 modifications to existing documents, and 3 deleted documents. Most of the work in editing and approving the updates was done by Greg Bennett, Tim Cadell, Scotty Gammenthaler, Predrag Lezaic, Ian Strock, Simon Rowland, Bobby Will, Jeremy Kraemer, Randall Severy, Brad Ackerman, and Candace Dicks. Some of the new documents and other updates were submitted by Richard Marsden, John Kruep, and Paul Blase. Peter Kokh played a large role in the huge volume of updates in the system by submitting over 100 documents as part of the Web Team MMM project.

The Web Team Missing Links project was restarted this past month. A new missing links report was generated, showing that over half of the missing links from the previous report have been fixed. Predrag Lezaic volunteered to lead the Missing Links project, and web page updates to fix missing links were submitted by Jeremy Kraemer, Candace Dicks, and Randall Severy. The Web Team Header and Footer Redesign project got underway, with John Peel volunteering to lead the project. As the first of a series of new templates for this project, Greg Bennett created new templates specifically for the MMM articles and a modified set of ADB templates.

The new Web Team Moon Miners' Manifesto (MMM) project was started this past month, with Candace Dicks leading the team. In addition to the large volume of submissions into the Web System by Peter Kokh, Dale Amon started tackling the very early MMM issues, which are only available in hardcopy. Nanci Brasket volunteered to catalog the MMM images in the ASI Image Library.

WWW Conversation Pages

Brian Cesar began doing some research in this area, which hasn't had any activity in a very long time. Brian proposed the use of "LWGate" as a simpler alternative to HyperNews.

Usenet newsgroups

No progress to report this month.

Online Services

The Artemis Windows backdrops that Vik Olliver had placed on CompuServe have now been downloaded over 300 times.

Real-time Meetings

The ECTC held its regular monthly IRC meeting on October 5, and it was another busy one, with a total of nine members showing up at one time or another. Most of the meeting focused on the new Web Team projects, and team leaders and volunteers were assigned to each project. There was a lengthy discussion in particular about the new MMM project, which was just getting started. A discussion was started on the main artemis-list mailing list about holding IRC meetings for general Artemis Project activities, but meeting times and places have not yet been determined.

Miscellaneous

Tim Cadell continued to update the news articles in the ASI Online News in his role as acting ASI Newsmonger. Tim updated the Cronkite software that manages the news articles on the ASI site to fix some problems with the directory index processing, and is working on a new update to integrate Cronkite more closely with the ASI Web System. Tim continues to look for additional writers and contacts in other ASI committees to provide activity reports as well as someone to take over as ASI Newsmonger. If you have any information that would be useful for an ASI Online News article, or if you would like to write for the Online News, contact Tim at <newsmonger@asi.org>

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