On-line Conferencing: Sitting at the Virtual Table

Prof. Thomas C. O'Haver (email: to2@umail.umd.edu)
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Spring, 1993

"I see a continuing need to increase links between people in various parts
of the organization to keep pace with technological advances...as foreign
and domestic competition drives us to seek constant improvement in our
operations..."  Arno Penzias, Director of Research, AT&T  Bell Labs (1)

"The most significant factor which distinguishes [organizations] which are
able to make effective and strategic use of communications networks is
their focus on networking people together rather than just thinking about
connecting machines and data."  Lisa Carlson, Megasystems Design Group,Inc.

Introduction 
In a general sense, "on-line conferencing" means the use of computer
networking and communication technology allow people to exchange ideas,
describe ongoing projects, share experiences, present research results,
and reach decisions, without traveling to a common location.  Already in
some corporations and research organizations, electronic conferencing is
beginning to replace some conventional meetings.  The technology used may
be a simple as plain text electronic mail (e-mail) or as sophisticated as
real-time two-way video.  The education community is also showing
interest; within the last several years, reports of applications of
on-line conferencing to distance learning, inservice training, rural
school districts, business education, and medical consulting have appeared
in the educational technology literature.

Scholars currently depend upon two main existing avenues of public
communication with their colleagues Ð physical meetings and print
publication.  On-line conferencing is not meant to replace either one. It
is rather a new medium that complements and to some degree fills in the
gap between these traditional channels.  On-line conferencing is distinct
from electronic publishing (electronic journals), which seeks to provide
an new channel for formal, peer-reviewed publication using computer
networks as a medium of distribution.  The essence of on-line
conferencing, as any conference, is interactive discussion and exchange of
ideas.

On-line conferencing can be either synchronous, where conferees
participate at the same time but in different places, or asynchronous,
where conferees participate at different times of the day over the
conference period, relying upon electronic media to store messages and
forward them to each .  The former is closer to the format of a
traditional physical meeting, and it allows for the possibility of
real-time interaction via data, sound, and video images, further
heightening the similarity to familiar modes of communication.  However,
asynchronous conferencing allows people with different schedules or even
different time zones to participate.  Matthew Rapaport, a researcher who
has studied many kinds of computer-mediated communications, reports that
"All researchers and developers in the field agree that most real work is
accomplished asynchronously, where the store-and-forward capabilities of
the software increase the communication potential of the medium across
time zones and personal schedules" (2).

Perhaps the main attraction of on-line conferencing is that it can be very
efficient: it is much less expensive and time-consuming to organize and to
participate in a on-line conference than a traditional physical conference
or meeting.  Moreover, in a on-line conference all the presented material
and all of the resulting discussion is potentially recordable, usually in
digital form, and thus can be archived for future access.  Compared to
traditional print publication, on-line conferencing is much faster and
allows interactive discussion. The on-line conference format presents the
opportunity for the kind of extended public discussion that is usually not
achieved in conventional meetings or in print publications.  On-line
conferencing would be especially valuable for people who are not able to
attend conventional meetings on subjects they are interested in, whether
by reason of cost or time or spoken language skills or physical
disability.  An additional benefit is that it permits the sharing of
actual research data, computer programs, images and graphics, and other
digital forms of information.

There are also clearly some disadvantages to on-line conferencing compared
to traditional meetings:  The pleasures of socializing at a physical
meeting are absent.  We are already familiar with the mechanics of
physical meetings (traveling, making slides, public speaking, socializing)
and of print publication (using libraries, subscribing to journals,
preparing manuscripts), whereas on-line conferencing requires skills that
are generally less familiar -  although not necessarily more complex in an
absolute sense.  It is quite possible that people who have been effective
and persuasive in face-to-face meetings may be less skillful in on-line
communication, which typically de-emphasizes the role of body language and
cultural factors.  This could be a significant political factor in some
organizations.  Perhaps most seriously, on-line conferencing does not yet
have recognition in the scholarly community; one of the reasons that we go
to meetings and publish papers is that it enhances our prestige and
reputation.  At the present time, the culture of electronic networks is
more inclusive and egalitarian than exclusive and prestigious.

Electronic mail conferencing 
A major constraint and concern in setting up any computer conference is
the skills and technology available to the participants.  If the
organizers want to attract the maximum number of participants, then they
have to search for a skillset and a technology which represents some form
of lowest common denominator.  For most people that lowest common
denominator is e-mail; it is by far the most widely used, most available
and fastest growing global computer networking service.  For many people,
e-mail is becoming part of everyday life. Obviously e-mail is useful for
much more than just conference, so the time and effort spent getting it
set up is amortized over many uses.  And e-mail is usually locally
supported by institutional computer support people, who provide
connections, run training classes, distribute public domain terminal
programs, provide a help line, etc.  Many scholars have already been using
e-mail routinely and will have become reasonably skillful with their
terminal programs.  E-mail is not ideal for conferencing - Rapaport (2)
points out several limitations compared to dedicated conference software -
but it is the closest thing we have to a "lowest common denominator".

In principle, it is possible to transfer digital data of any type over a
computer network, including formatted word-processor documents, graphics,
chemical structures, spreadsheets, executable binaries, HyperCard stacks,
even digitized photographs and video.  In fact, this is done all the time
over the Internet by FTP (File Transfer Protocol).  Access to these sorts
of data is potentially an advantage of network conferencing compared to
traditional print publication.  However, some knowledge of computer and
network operation is required of conferees to access and make use of such
material.  One of our tasks will be to identify software that makes this
as easy as possible.

The CHEMCONF Model
CHEMCONF '93 is an international on-line conference covering the use
of computers, video, audio, films and other technologies in the teaching
of chemistry at the secondary, college, and graduate level.  The
experimental conference, which is planned for the summer of 1993, is
sponsored by the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical
Education's Committee on Computers in Chemical Education. CHEMCONF is
based on a combination of widely-available international network services:
e-mail, LISTSERV, and FTP.  LISTSERV is the basis of a large number of
year-round, free-form discussion groups.  However, CHEMCONF differs from
those discussion groups in that it is more structured: that is, it is
focussed on a specific topic and it occurs over a particular time period -
in other words, it is an "event".  LISTSERV is not specifically designed
as a conferencing system, but it is very widely available and requires
only generic e-mail access in order to participate.  Most commercial
conferencing systems are developed for a specific computer platform or
network.  The decision was made early on to make CHEMCONF available to the
widest possible international audience, rather than to a smaller sub-set
of people with access to one particular network, computer, or type of
conferencing software.

As in a conventional physical conference, the focal point is invited and
contributed papers submitted by authors and distributed electronically to
the participants.  After a suitable reading period (several days),
discussion would be called for.  We structure the discussion period,
according to a schedule distributed to conferees beforehand, into a
sequence of time periods for each paper.  Conferees would then know when
to "tune in" for the papers they are interested in, and they have a way to
turn the flow of messages on and off at will.  During each discussion
period, limited to one particular paper, all discussion is public, seen by
all participants.  Participants are able to ask questions of the authors
or of any other participant.  A moderator monitors the discussion to keep
it on track and to discourage excessive digression, overly long messages,
and inappropriate behavior.  The time frame for this discussion is on the
order of minutes to hours - longer for people in other time zones.  Note
that this time frame is longer than the instant response expected during
the question period at the end of a talk at a conventional conference but
much shorter than the response time for letters to the editor in a print
journal (typically many months).  We feel that this may well turn out to
be an ideal time frame for scholarly discussion: long enough to compose
thoughtful questions and responses, but not so long that one loses
interest in the topic.

We are making some basic assumptions about the skills and capabilities of
potential participants.  All participants are assumed to possess basic
computer literacy and to have a personal e-mail address on Internet,
Bitnet, or any connected network or commercial information service.  We
assume participants can send, receive, and read plain text messages via
e-mail.  This is the absolute minimal requirement. While not an absolute
requirement, we also assume participants will know how to capture and save
incoming mail messages for off-line reading (especially useful for large
messages such as the presented papers.)  Participants wishing to access
graphics and other non-text material are assumed to be willing to obtain
and use the software required to capture and save incoming mail messages
as text files and to convert those files into usable form, according to a
procedure that we have worked out and tested.

During the first two weeks of February, 1993, a "Trial Session" of the
CHEMCONF On-line Conference was conducted for the purpose of testing and
debugging the conference format. That trial involved three papers, 25 GIF
figures, and over 200 participants from 24 countries.  An evaluation
questionnaire was distributed to all participants.  The feedback from that
questionnaire was very helpful in modifying procedures and policies for
the "real" conference in summer of 1993.

We currently have over 350 registrants from 26 different countries.  (This
number should continue to grow until the registration deadline on June 1.)
Approximately twenty-five percent of the registrants are from abroad.
Some registrants are as far away as Australia,  Hong Kong and Taiwan.  It
is unlikely we could have attracted so many participants from abroad to a
regular meeting of this sort.

What lies ahead? 
We have not had much experience with a meeting of this type.  It
represents an experiment.  We need to learn what type of paper best lends
itself to such a meeting.  Both authors and participants need to learn how
to most effectively participate in a conference of this sort.  Computer
conferencing is in its infancy. In twenty years much more sophisticated
hardware and software will be widely available.  It will be much easier to
deal with graphics.  Sound and video images will be more easily handled.

It is very common with the introduction of a new technology that after
users have had some time to work with the technology they come up with
much different uses for it than were originally conceived by the
developers of the technology.  I don't think the developers of e-mail had
this sort of conference in mind.  Another common problem with the
introduction of a new technology is that in the beginning there is too
much focus on the technology itself.  With practice, the technology
ultimately fades into the background and the focus properly shifts to
people and ideas.  For how many people has e-mail reached that point?  The
first time I gave a talk at a national meeting, I was worried about how my
voice would sound, how my slides would look, how I was dressed, etc.  Sure
enough, the slides do get stuck sometimes, but I don't worry about those
things much now.  I'm afraid it will be some time before computer-based
communications technology fades into the background.  As usual, the real
problems are not technological but human.

It is interesting to compare the development of on-line conferencing to
other areas of our lives where media has competed with reality, for
example: concerts vs. recorded music; stage plays vs. movies; art
galleries vs. art books and prints; live bands vs DJs, flying real planes
vs. flight simulators.  Everyone agrees that the former is "better" that
the latter, and yet it's safe to say that most people have experienced
much more of the latter that the former.  It's simply a matter of
efficiency.   The development of a technological or media-based 
alternative does not replace the real thing but rather promotes it 
to a higher level, to be appreciated more rarely, perhaps, but more 
fully.



References:

1.  Arno Penzias, "Ideas and Information" Touchstone, 1989.

2. Matthew Rapaport, "Computer mediated communications: bulletin boards,
computer conferencing, electronic mail, and information retrieval", Wiley,
New York, 1991.