Subject: draft minutes of Chi meeting

From: April Marine <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1998 15:59:49 -0700 (PDT)

Hi all,

Here is a draft of the minutes for last week's meeting in Chicago.  Now is
the time to send me corrections or complaints!  If I hear nothing, I'll
send them over to the secretariat next week.

thanks!
April
-------------

Minutes for the User Services Working Group (USWG) meeting of
August 24, 1998 in Chicago, IL.

These were written by April Marine, so any value-laden adjectives,
such as "excellent" or "useful" reflect my own point of view!

Hint: If you are reading these, I am writing  them in the order of the
agenda.  The most interesting topics for feedback are discussed around
the item "Evolving to Dynamic Document Formats."  (Note: "interesting"
is one of those adjectives I discussed above. :-)

o  USV Area Report

April Marine, USV Area Director, chaired the meeting and presented a
brief report on the status of the Area.  The report highlighted the
status of pending Internet Drafts and noted when working groups were
meeting that week.

Drafts that were pending were:
     <draft-ietf-run-spew-06.txt>
     <draft-ietf-run-adverts-00.txt>
     <draft-ietf-run-ssh-users-08.txt>

Of these, the first and last are in the final stages.

o  TERENA Update

In the absence of anyone from the TERENA ISUS (Information Services
and User Services) Working Group being able to attend IETF in Chicago,
April gave a brief update on TERENA activities, with thanks to email
from Peter Valkenburg.  Peter is the ISUS Project Development Officer.
Information on TERENA can be found at http://www.terena.nl/working
groups/wg-isus/.  

Brief updates were given for the following 4 task forces:

ETINU.  This task force is just completing their project on Evaluation
and Recommendation of User Support Toolkits.  An interim report can be
found at http://www.terena.nl/task-forces/tf-etinu/report.html.

CHIP.  Clearing House for Internet Projects is just getting under way.
The goal of this project is to start a pilot service with information
on Internet related projects in the area of research and education.
The original proposal is available at
http://www.terena.nl/working-groups/wg-isus/misc/CHIP_proposal.html.

CHIC-pilot.  Cooperative Hierarchical Indexing Coordination.  This
pilot project brings together several indexing technologies to run
search services across multiple indexing technologies.  A pilot
service has been set up at
http://www.terena.nl/cgi-bin/chic-search.cgi.  This work also came up
in a BOF in Chicago called METAD (MIME Enabled Textually Accessed
Directories).

Guide to Network Resource Tools has been printed as a book by Addison
Wesley Longman (http://www.awl-he.com/titles/08224.html).  However,
the online version will be kept up to date and the newest version is
always at http://www.terena.nl/gnrt/.  Translation rights to the guide
have been handed out for 6 languages.  Peter made the point in a
separate email that this Guide may server as a good model for future
publications by USV.  

o  Progress of FYI4 Update 

Ray Plzak lead a discussion of the work on the FYI4 update.  Some of
the discussion echoed previous similar discussions, but volunteers
were found to help get a new draft out.  They were Phil Nesser, Amy
Tracy Wells, Ed Krol, and Albert Lunde.  Their goal is to have a draft
for comment out by mid-October.  If there is a substantive draft for
discussion in Orlando, April will consider giving this effort its own
meeting slot so they don't have to share USWG.  But that won't be done
without a draft.  The consensus was basically to start from scratch
since the "new user" audience had substantially changed in the several
years since the doc was first written.  The References/Bibliography
section will be retained, but those present voted to eliminate the
current Reading List and Glossary sections.

o  Status of other FYI docs

Phillip J. Nesser volunteered to look at all the FYIs and present an
opinion of what should be done with them.  He had recently had cause
to look for some material appropriate for presenting when introducing
the Internet and was disappointed to find many of the FYIs to be on
good topics, but out of date.  His suggestion is that we move some to
Historic, and update others, notably FYI4.  During the discussion, the
suggestion was made that while previously we had FYIs for "new" and
"experienced/intermediate" users, that now we may need more flavors
than just two.  Phil said he would send a list of docs to the list
with his recommendations of which should move to Historic and which
others we might have to do something else with.  (I don't think it is
an issue to move FYIs to Historic, but I will check with the IESG.)

Based on Phil's topic of "what should we do" many people had excellent
suggestions for better ways of presenting information.  In the past,
USV has tended to do rather large documents, which are daunting to
work on and even more daunting to try to update.  One suggestion was
to do shorter, more focused documents which would be quicker to write
and easier to update, if necessary.  Phil's topic led nicely to the
next one.

o Evolving to Dynamic Document Formats

In addition to the "what should we do" question, we also asked "how
shall we do it?"  There was very strong support for moving away from
sticking strictly to the text RFC document format, while recognizing
that there was also a lot to be gained from retaining that format in
parallel of anything new.  RFCs, for example, are readable by everyone
online and are nice hardcopies to give to areas of the world that are
in the early stages of setting up Internet connectivity.  However,
much of today's audience will not read an online RFC; they are used to
a more Web/HyperText presentation and possibly only have the attention
span for smaller chunks of information.  Plus, they like pictures.
More to the point, they really expect pictures these days.  So the
group wanted to expand our presentation choices to HTML and possibly
PDF; they challenge is how to attain these goals while not totally
abandoning the RFC process; i.e. how to mesh the two objectives.  No
concrete answers to that, but new work will definitely face this
challenge, starting perhaps with FYI4.

In addition to this narrow question, some ideas were discussed of a
broader nature.  Among the suggestions for USV roles was that USWG
could be a "standing committee" that would help IETFers understand
some of the ins and outs, not only of the work of the Areas, but of
common questions, like how best to set up a terminal room.  We could
present tutorials on the other Areas.  USV could be like an archive
resource or keep some of the institutional memory of the IETF.  Also
we could host a kind of "hot topic" series that was more like articles
or features that did a short topic update of a current idea or trend.
Also, that we could act as a "swat team" to get info together for
press releases on breaking issues.  Also that we could publish docs
differently, possibly by having a voting mechanism on the Web for
gathering consensus regarding the information presented.  There were
several creative ideas and a lot of energy for trying something new.

o  Project Isaac - Call for Collaboration

Susan Calcari of the Scout Project then spoke of a new Project
currently called ISAAC (but whose name may change), which is a
resource discovery tool to search already established local, quality
collections of resources that use metadata to describe their contents.
She explained the architecture of the service and the types of
collaborators they are looking for.  Basically, collaborators may join
as a collection node, i.e. a site that hosts a collection and
describes it via metadata; or one may join as a "full node" and offer
a gathered index and search interface, as well as (optionally) a
resource collection.  (The metadata in question here are things like
"author" "title" etc. that may or may not also be present in the
resource itself, but which are presented along with the resource
collection in a format that can be gathered and indexed by the tools
the project is using.)  Current partners are SSGFI in Germany and
Cornell Law's Insight project.  More information can be found at
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/research/ or email to
[email-masked].

o  User Services in Developing Countries

Zita Wenzel, wearing her Network Startup Resource Center hat, has done
some work in writing up a guide to administrative procedures of the
Internet infrastructure, aimed at assisting organizations in
developing countries to navigate the challenge of getting online.  She
basically wished to understand the role of USWG in supporting
developing countries and to know if we could act as a resource in her
work in this area.  The group mentioned some efforts along these
lines, some of which she was already aware (such as the ISOC
Developing Countries Workshops).  Plus, the point was made that some
of the FYIs were of use to all new users, even though we had never
really targeted users in developing countries specifically.  At any
rate, she was reassured that the group definitely had an interest in
assisting efforts in this area, that the topic fell within the scope
of the group, and that people would be happy to help.

o  Next Steps and Wrap Up

Finally, we spent some time wrapping up.  The action items for each
topic were reiterated:

  Ray, Amy, Phil, Ed, Albert:  FYI 4 draft by Oct 12
  Phil:  list of "historic" FYIs to list soon
  April: check re HTML RFCs and publishing in various formats;
         develop a draft suggestion for how to manage the FYI docs;
         develop a draft of what information needs to be created;
         develop a draft suggestion of steps re how to do the above.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
April Marine			
GLOBE Program			1-800-858-9947  --> Help Desk
NASA Ames Research Center	650-604-0762    --> me
(Raytheon ITSS)			[email-masked]

IETF User Services (USV)	http://archimedes.nasa.gov/usv/
     Area Director