All opinions are welcome! This message board is offered to
accomodate announcements, questions & answers about Native American
technologies, arts, crafts, AND as a forum to discuss issues important
to the Original Peoples. By listening to to others, we can begin to
understand and appreciate human diversity, and perhaps learn
something new.
URL: http://www.lib.uconn.edu/NativeTech/msgboard/
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Tara Prindle E-mail~prindle@uconnvm.uconn.edu
----------- NativeTech: Native American Technology and Art ------------
http://www.lib.uconn.edu/NativeTech/
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Comments from NativeNet listowner, Gary Trujillo (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us):
I'd like to wish all the best to Tara in this new venture and to try to
put the matter in a broader context, which I'll do in a separate article,
posted as a followup to this one. For now, let me say that I think that
the World Wide Web has great potential as a resource for the kinds of
exchanges we've been having on the NativeNet mailing lists for the past
several years. I've been looking at a number of software packages over
the course of the past week which handle Web-based conferencing. The
(public domain) software that Tara has chosen seems among the simplest
of the lot - which carries some advantages and some disadvantages. I
was able to install a copy of this same software, which anyone can obtain
free of charge, from a Web-based archive, and find that it works fairly
well, but it does have some limitations - whereas some of the alternatives
seemed to have too many features, so that they could be confusing to learn
to use, or else they depend on features found only in advanced Web browsers,
which makes them unsuitable at the present time, when a broad array of
browser technology is in use. (There are some commercial packages as well,
but a no-budget operation cannot afford such things.)
After a bit of reflection, I've decided to do some work on this (WWWBoard)
software over the weekend to make it more suitable for our purposes. I'll
announce several conferences based on whatever emerges available early next
week, and will announce the details of these conferences as well as offering
more of an analysis of what I see as being implied by the emergence of Web-
based conferencing, particularly as regards the future of the NativeNet
mailing lists (I suspect we will want to think about a gradual transition
toward the Web over the course of the next several years) and its potential
to provide a vehicle for doing what I have long hoped to accomplish with
NativeNet.
I have begun to write up my thoughts on this latter subject, which are now
available on the NativeNet Web site. One possible test of the Web-based
conferencing idea might be to conduct an open forum on the ideas that I've
tried to lay out, which include both a possible vision for our community
and some practical ideas on what we might be able to accomplish together.
If anyone would like to take a look at these things and maybe mull them
over on the weekend, so that you can offer your thoughts next week when I
will have the conference set up, point your Web browser at the NativeNet
home page ("http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/natnet/") and look at the "information"
item, which will take you to a few areas that talk about such ideas as
having focussed discussions on topics that came up at the 1989 conference
that gave me the inspiration to start NativeNet and about coordinating
specific projects that we might contemplate working on as a community.
It is in areas like these that I feel Web-based conferencing has lots of
potential, for reasons which may be fairly obvious but that I'll try to
express when announcing the first experimental ones next week. I may also
provide access to a commercial package that I've installed as a trial to
demonstrate the sort of thing that may ultimately be possible (it's a
"try-before-you-buy" version that will remain operational for only
another week or so).
In any event, I think it will be interesting to see how things go with
Tara's experiment. I'll have more to say about my own early next week.
Gary