27 May 1998
April was a slow month for the Electronic Communications Technical Committee, as many ECTC members devoted time to other Artemis Project projects, notably the new launch of Lunar Traders, the completion of the full-size Artemis Project poster, and the Microlander Project. As usual, the Web Team provided most of the ECTC activity this past month, as the update volume through the ASI web system continued at a heavy pace. All ASI mailing lists were reconfigured this past month to require list owner approval for all new list subscriptions.
The ECTC grew by three new members in April, with the addition of Paul Morris, Lorianne Hamoline, and Tom Tang. At the end of April, the ECTC had 27 active members, with another 48 people in the Observer or Rep categories. You can find the complete ECTC membership listing, including ICQ numbers, at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html . As always, there is still 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:
Nanci Brasket stepped down temporarily from her role in manning the Comm and Info Center while recovering from brain surgery. During her absence, Rebecca Wilson is filling the post, with ongoing help in responding to guestbook entries from Joelle Cowan and Chris Verwey.
Rhoda Bryant's "Conversation Guidelines for electronic discussions" were a key topic of the April ECTC IRC meeting. To enforce some mailing list policy changes recently approved by the ASI board of directors, Bobby Will changed the configurations of all ASI mailing lists to require list owner approval for any new list subscriptions. Bobby also set up a new ASI mailing list, art-mining, and started work on a request for a new mailing list from the Medical technical committee. The complete list of ASI mailing lists is available at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/03/mailing-lists.html .
The ASI web site had another quiet month in April, with no system problems reported. The backlog in the Web Formatting and Editing stages of the ASI web system began to clear out as the Web and Editing teams worked hard to catch up on the outstanding update requests. The Missing Links project contributed a significant number of new update requests, as Bobby Will and Jeremy Kraemer tackled several key sections of the ADB.
During April, a total of 188 updates were published to the ASI web site, including 38 new documents, 99 modifications to existing documents, 15 deleted documents, 35 moved documents, and 1 renamed document. The latest updates bring the total number of documents on the ASI web site to 2108 HTML documents and 792 GIF and JPEG images. Most of the work in editing and approving the updates was done by Luanne Jorewicz, Bobby Will, Greg Bennett, John Wertz, Leah Simpson, Candace Dicks, Jeremy Kraemer, and Ian Strock. Some of the new documents and other updates were submitted by Tim Cadell, Paul Morris, and Richard Marsden.
The April ECTC IRC meeting spent a significant time on Web Team projects, as well as the newly restarted ASI Site Design project. Tim Cadell's "Web Ring" program sparked a lot of discussion as well, as potential uses for the program were discussed in a lengthy brainstorming session.
No progress to report this month.
No progress to report this month.
Vik Olliver mentioned the Artemis Project on CompuServe and received a lot of responses, many indicating that they had thought that the project was dead. Vik has contacted Tim Cadell about providing a regular news release.
The April ECTC IRC meeting on April 4 was another well-attended meeting, with thirteen members attending some or all of the meeting. The meeting lasted a long time, almost four hours total, partly due to a fairly slow start and distractions by the start of the HBO mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon". In addition to the E-mail Conversation Guidelines and ASI Site Design discussions, a lot of the conversation focused on several key Web Team projects: the Moon Miners Manifesto archives, the Missing Links project, and the Header and Footer Templates project. Much of the MMM discussion involved issues with dealing with the large volume of images scanned in from early MMM issues.