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By all counts August was by far the busiest month ever for the Electronic Communications Technical Committee. The move of the asi.org domain was completed this past month, but with a lot more chaos than had originally been planned. Early in the month we had finished drafting the contract with IO, our new ISP, and on August 19th IO signed the contract. The plans for an orderly move were shattered, however, when on that same day we learned that four days later, on Friday, August 23, the URL of the ASI web site would be plastered all over the television screens of England when an episode of Future Fantastic on the BBC, featuring a segment on the Artemis Project taped at Artemis '96 in Houston, was aired.
The news of the broadcast forced a mad rush to complete the move in enough time to have the web site moved and stable in time for the broadcast. With the InterNIC updating their domain name database in record time, we managed to get the web site moved and up and running with ten minutes to spare before the broadcast! If moving the site wasn't enough chaos, plans were going on simultaneously to hold the first ever Artemis IRC conference concurrently with the BBC broadcast. Dale Amon, and his company, the Genesis Project, sponsored an IRC channel on the DALnet IRC network to provide a place where viewers of the BBC broadcast could stop by and ask questions of ASI members. Information about the IRC channel was posted on the BBC's web site and on the ASI web site. Greg Bennett, Simon Rowland, Dale Amon, Richard Perry, Dana Carson, Randall Severy, and several other ASI members signed on to the IRC channel for periods of time over the following weekend to talk to current and potential ASI members. By most accounts the IRC conference was a success, with up to a dozen people logged on at various times, and it generated a flood of new members for the ASI UK chapter.
The move of the ASI domain is almost complete. There are a variety of clean-up tasks that still need to be done to get everything back to normal, but efforts are underway to finish those up as soon as possible. With the completion of the asi.org move, the ECTC is finally in a position to implement many of the remaining electronic communication services that have been discussed for the last 10 months. You can expect to see a variety of announcements about new services that will be available to ASI in the next few months. One of the key new services already being implemented is the use of the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) environment for holding real-time meetings. Following the success of the first IRC conference on the DALnet network, the ECTC will be holding its first committee meeting on a new ASI IRC server on September 1, starting a continuing series of monthly IRC meetings for the ECTC. Based on the experiences gained from this first meeting, we expect to see other ASI technical committees and project teams start using IRC for team meetings as well.
The ECTC added several new members this month, all in the observer category. James Leveque, Bob Smither, Georges Grenon, and Brian Jurkowski all joined the ECTC this past month. As always, you can find the complete ECTC membership listing at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html. There were no new tasks added to the ECTC task list this month, but with the completion of the asi.org move there should be a lot of progress soon in many of the existing tasks. As always, if you would like to join the ECTC and help out, please check the ECTC task list on the ASI web site at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc_tasks.html and sign up for anything that interests you, even if there are already names listed for the task.
Here is the latest status information from the individual work areas within the ECTC:
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