May 1998 ECTC Status Report
May was another slow month for the Electronic Communications Technical
Committee, except for some exciting activity at the International Space
Development Conference in Milwaukee. Most of the ECTC activity again came
from the Web Team, as the updates through the ASI web system continued at
high levels.
The ECTC grew by one new member in May, as five new members offset four
departures of existing members. The new members are Thomas Hernandez,
Chris Low, WaterWar83, and Humberto Massa. Mail to Marco Costa, Steve
Cobourne-Smith, and Noel Friesen started bouncing in May and their
addresses were removed from the mailing list. And Lorianne Hamoline
decided to leave the ECTC. An update from April that was left off last
month's report is the address changes of Jeremy Kraemer and Tim Cadell. At
the end of May, the ECTC had 27 active members, with another 49 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:
Help Desk
Nanci Brasket returned to her role in manning the Comm and Info Center
as her successful recovery from brain surgery continues.
Listserver Mailing Lists
Although there were no configuration changes made to the ASI mailing
lists last month, it was hardly a quiet month for the ASI mailing lists.
E-mail traffic on the artemis-list and microlander-team mailing lists were
extremely heavy all month long, with a lot of excellent discussion taking
place on those and other ASI mailing lists. Rhoda Bryant's "Conversation
Guidelines for electronic discussions" were discussed again in the May ECTC
IRC meeting and will soon be posted on the ASI web site.
World Wide Web Server
The ASI web site continued to improve in May, as the Missing Links
project continued to clean up link problems on the site. Although a high
volume of updates continued to go through the ASI web system, the Web and
Editing teams were able to keep up with the update requests and no
significant backlogs developed.
During May, a total of 158 updates were published to the ASI web site,
including 62 new documents, 79 modifications to existing documents, 9
deleted documents, 7 moved documents, and 1 renamed document. The latest
updates bring the total number of documents on the ASI web site to 2136
HTML documents and 834 GIF and JPEG images. Most of the work in editing
and approving the updates was done by Luanne Jorewicz, Leah Simpson, Greg
Bennett, John Wertz, Ian Randal Strock, Candace Dicks, Jeremy Kraemer, Tim
Cadell, and Simon Rowland. Some of the new documents and other updates
were submitted by Richard Perry, Predrag Lezaic, Kurt Klaus, Joelle Cowan,
and Charles Collier.
The Web Team projects were again a key topic at the May ECTC IRC
meeting, along with continued discussion about the ASI Site Design project.
John Peel completed the new header and footer templates, ending the first
phase of that Web Team project. John Wertz generated a new set of Missing
Links reports, which provide an updated set of missing links that need
correction.
WWW Conversation Pages
No progress to report this month.
Usenet newsgroups
No progress to report this month.
Online Services
No progress to report this month.
Real-time Meetings
The May ECTC IRC meeting was held on May 10 and was as active as most
previous meetings, despite a lower turnout of nine members. Some of the
ECTC tasks discussed in the meeting included the E-mail Conversation
Guidelines, the ADB Outline, the ASI Site Design project, Web Search
Engine, and the Electronic Communications FAQ. The Missing Links and Moon
Miners Manifesto Archives Web Team projects also saw a lot of discussion
during the meeting.
The most significant event of the month, and probably for the year so
far, however, had to be the live broadcast from the International Space
Development Conference in Milwaukee. Held over the Memorial Day weekend,
this year's ISDC was the first to include a program track dedicated to the
Artemis Project. The Artemis Project sessions on Sunday, May 24 were
broadcast live over the Internet using a combination of IRC and a WebCam
camera taking pictures from the conference room in the Hyatt hotel in
Milwaukee. ECTC members staffed the IRC terminal during the sessions,
transcribing some of the presentations and discussions taking place during
the sessions. The WebCam camera took periodic snapshots of the
presentations and panel discussions during the sessions and posted the
pictures on the ASI web site. As the ECTC's first experiment with a live
event broadcast, the ISDC broadcast went surprisingly well. Future Artemis
Project events will see similar, and improved, broadcasts based on our
experiences at the 1998 ISDC.
Miscellaneous
Tom Wheeler agreed to take over the role of ASI Newsmonger, relieving
Tim Cadell of his title of "acting ASI Newsmonger", although Tim will
remain involved in a supporting role. Before the staffing changes, Tim
added several more news articles to the ASI Online News. Tom and Tim
continue to look for additional writers and contacts in other ASI
committees to provide activity reports. 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 Tom at "newsmonger@asi.org".
ASI W9800590r1.0.
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