Subject: PWG> Alta-Vista Forum: improved e-meeting approach for PWG, PMP, JMP, IPP, and SENSE?

From: Tom Hastings <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 17:31:36 PST

I've recently learned of a tool that Digital offers, called Alta Vista Forum.
It provides a distributed structured electronic meeting capability.
Its a web-based tool that allows threaded conversations to take place
on any number of topics.  Any participant can add a new topic, such as
an issue or a question or an action item.  Any participant can reply to
the topic and a running thread is kept for each topic.  I used such a
tool at Digital for 15 years called Notes (Lotus turned it into a product).
Its great for keeping track of discussions.  Its much better than e-mail
in which all of the threads are mixed together.  Each user can have replies
e-mailed to them if they want or not, their choice.

I checked out http://www.alta-vista.software.digital.com and found that
they offer an "electronic business tower", where you can go and "rent"
rooms for such meetings, free for a month and can extend for another month.
Then if you like the results, you can have Digital setup a server for you
(for a fee I haven't discovered).

I suggest that someone from the PWG investigate the web page more and
propose that we try it out.  I suggest that each PWG project be a separate
forum and have a general PWG forum for general topics that affect all projects.
So we'd have separate PWG, PMP, JMP, IPP, and SENSE forums.

If this is as good as it sounds, we might want to propose using it to the
IETF for other WGs.

Comments?

Can we discuss briefly at tommorrow's IPP telecon?

Thanks,
Tom

P.S. If its really good, we may be able to cut down on the number of meetings.