April 1996 ECTC Status Report
Despite some difficulties and challenges in several key areas, the
Electronic Communications Technical
Committee got back in gear and had a
productive month in April. The wait for moving the asi.org domain to a new
ISP continued, but a decision was made to no longer wait for the move to
implement many of the plans of the ECTC. The move itself, as well as
updates to the ASI web server, were heavily impacted by the breakdown of
Dana Carson's Mac. Dana is the Artemis Webmaster and has been coordinating
the process of moving the asi.org domain. The rest of the ECTC tried to
fill in as best as they could in Dana's absence, but we are all hoping for
Dana's speedy return to our electronic community.
We welcomed several new members to the ECTC this past month. Chris
Eason took over the role of Artemis contact on America OnLine, allowing
Candace Dicks to devote more of her time to the Office of Space Flight.
John Peel joined the team and volunteered to help out with some of the
procedure guides. Rounding out the new additions are Brian Cesar, John
Kavanagh, and Ray Vanlandingham. In the area of changes, in what is a
common occurrance in the Internet arena Rick Bier and Charles Collier have
changed their e-mail addresses. You can find the complete ECTC membership,
along with e-mail addresses and home pages, on the ECTC web page at
http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html.
As always, we are constantly looking for new ECTC members to help with
the rapidly growing workload the committee has to deal with. Check out the
ECTC task list
(http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc_tasks.html) and please
sign up for anything that interests you. Feel free to sign up for tasks
that already have people working on them, many of the ECTC members are
extremely busy and can always use help. One of the key tasks we are
trying to fill right now is someone to coordinate the design and
implementation of a new ASI web server home page. We are also looking for
people to help out in setting up and maintaining newsgroups and to write a
procedure guide for updating the ASI web site. Since all of the ECTC tasks
are a team effort, you don't need to have a lot of special skills to do any
of the tasks. Those skills exist throughout the ECTC team and you can call
on anyone else in the team for help.
Here is the latest status information from the individual work areas
within the ECTC:
Help Desk
Nanci Brasket continued answering questions directed to the Comm and
Info Center. Nanci also added eight new images to the ASI image library
and edited several hundred ASI web pages.
Listserver Mailing Lists
Since the ASI domain move has not yet taken place, we decided not to
wait on setting up several new mailing lists this month. The
art-biz
mailing list was set up to handle general business discussions about the
Artemis Project. The art-biz-cdrom list
will handle those discussions
relating to the new CD-ROM project. The Lunar Outpost Advanced Planning
Technical Committee now has their own mailing list,
art-moonbase. A new
mailing list, art-prop,
is also now available for the Propulsion Technical
Committee. The newly formed SSTO Concept Design Team can use the new list
art-ssto for their team discussions.
Information about joining any of
these mailing lists is available from the Mailing Lists web page at
http://www.asi.org/adb/09/03/mailing-lists.html.
World Wide Web Server
The Artemis Data Book (ADB) on the ASI web server has grown by an
exponential amount this month, thanks to the almost single-handed efforts
of Simon Rowland, the ADB "book boss". Simon has finished going through
the artemis-list mail archives for material for the ADB, and has just
started on the GEnie archives, which should provide lots of new material
for the ADB.
The task that was started last month to overhaul the ASI web server
home page saw a lot of activity this past month as an extremely active
discussion about the home page occurred on the ECTC mailing list. To focus
the discussion on a specific target, the team has agreed on the end of May
as the target date for completing the design of the new "front door". If
you have any ideas or suggestions in this area, please don't hesitate in
passing them on to the ECTC at
asi-ecomm@asi.org.
We are still looking for
a volunteer to coordinate the brainstorming and design efforts for the home
page, so if you are interested (you don't even have to know anything about
HTML) let the ECTC know as soon as possible.
WWW Conversation Pages
Randall Severy has done some additional research into available tools
to support web conversation pages. Despite the lack of an integrated
mailing-list interface, HyperNews seems to be the best candidate for our
needs and appears to be the most popular non-commercial solution currently
available on the web. The actual implementation of this capability is
currently waiting for the ASI domain move.
Usenet newsgroups
No progress to report this month.
On-line services
Chris Eason, in his new role as Artemis AOL contact, contacted the
OMNI Magazine Online Editor about setting up an Artemis area in the OMNI
forum on America OnLine. If that plan is approved, and it looks promising,
several key Artemis documents will be made available in that forum and a
direct link will be established to the ASI web server.
Bulletin Boards
David Brummel wrote up a description of the gateway he runs between
several Artemis mailing lists and the FidoNet BBS network. The
description
is available on the ASI web site. Jim Nobles began exploring the
possibility of setting up a link between the Artemis mailing lists and the
RIME BBS network. His description
of the proposed gateway is also
available on the ASI web site.
Real-time Meetings
No progress to report this month.
Miscellaneous
Tom Hopper worked on a basic outline for the EC FAQ.
ASI W9800611r1.1.
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