• traditional text chat environments;
• audio/video conferencing environments;
• web-based chat environments;
• “paging” environments;
• MOOS;
• Palace servers.

Internet Relay Chat has been very popular with Internet enthusiasts for many years.  Millions of users connect to hundreds of IRC servers through thousands of channels at any time throughout the day or the night.  There are dozens of shareware IRC client software packages available for all platforms including, Window 3.x, Win95/NT, DOS, Mac and UNIX.  IRC is therefore an obvious environment to utilise in this project. Use the IRC server at Yeppoon SHS set up by Roy Kennedy - server: irc.yeppoon.shs.net.au port: 6667

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Server-based Conferencing
As soon as Internet conferencing is mentioned we tend to think of conference servers.  Many users log onto a server and share video and audio data with all the participants. The use of conference servers usually raise the issues of bandwidth and conference fees.  The use of conference servers have clear advantages and this project is going to examine some of the issues and costs involved with using conference servers and provide feedback to ACCE.

Non-server based Conferencing
This is a new field for desktop and laptop users.  The idea of being able to connect to other users and share text, audio, video, files and whiteboards without working through a conferencing server is very exciting.  Microsoft NetMeeting is the product that reviewers in leading computer magazines have praised consistently for it’s quality and reliability and best of all, it’s free.  The problem is that it is available only for the Windows 95/NT platforms at the moment.  I have been informed that the Mac version is under development.  Other packages need to be examined.

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There are a large number of web-based chat facilities available.  Almost all of them are public spaces and with many of them allowing a registered user to create and administer a private room.  My biggest complaint with web-based chat facilities is that they are far too slow to be effective as an environment for a meeting to conduct business.  They are fine for a”bit of a chat”.  IChat Client is a browser plugin that is available for the Mac, Win95/NT and Windows 3.x platforms and for Netscape Navigator 2.0 (or later version) or Internet Explorer as an Active X plugin.  I have used this environment a number of times and it seems to be an exception to the rule.  The speed of screen refresh is reasonably fast.  I am trialing this package at the moment and will provide feedback as it comes to hand.

A web-chat facility run by South East Region Computer Technology Centre in Victoria is at http://www.serct.schnet.edu.au/chat/Welcome.html. This is a web-chat facility for teacher and the professional education community. It is a reasonably fast web-chat facility. At this stage it doesn't have the facility to set up private rooms. From what I can determine, it is run by a CGI script.

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There are a number of great paging/chat programs available such as ICQ, IChat Pager and PowWow.  The problem is that if we are going to be able to hold meetings on the net we need to have a package that is available on Mac, Win95/NT and Windows 3.x platforms.  None of the packages mentioned are available for all three platforms!!  Please, find me one that is!!

PS. Having written these word some times ago, the ICQ site now lists a version for each platform.

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Anyone who has worked with synchronous communications will have sooner or later worked in either or both of these worlds on the Internet.  We ought to consider a range of feedback from people about these environments and their use for meetings.  My initial thoughts are that MOOS are great fun and provide a rich environment but that the busy association executive won’t want to go through the learning curve required to become proficient at meeting in this environment.  Palace servers are just superb because of the graphical nature of the world the user works within.  However, again my initial thoughts are that speed of use and the installation and learning curve is possibly too steep for use as a meeting environment.