Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mcnc!beguine!uncmed.med.unc.edu!dfiled
From: dfiled@uncmed.med.unc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Creative (?) Use of Internet
Message-ID: <894@beguine.UUCP>
Date: 22 Aug 90 14:42:22 GMT
Sender: usenet@beguine.UUCP
Reply-To: dfiled@uncmed.med.unc.edu ()
Organization: UNC-CH School of Medicine, Office of Information Systems
Lines: 59

We are in the process of setting up a program that involves about a dozen
medical school faculty members at various sites around the U.S.  We want to
use both electronic mail and electronic conferencing to allow these persons
to communicate with us and with each other throughout the course of this
two-year program.  

After some initial, fairly generic training in electronic communications (in
Chapel Hill--the members of this group are here for short stints about six
times during the two-year period), we will ask each of them to set up an
account on whatever mail system they have locally.  (Prior to this, I will
have done some "long range" investigation as to what is available to them and
what the usage policies are at their local sites; this will be presented to 
them at the training session.)  

In a previous incarnation of this program (1988-89), electronic mail was used
quite effectively by the members of the group.  They have to do a lot of
communicating because one of the projects undertaken is a funding proposal,
the text of which is developed jointly by the whole group.  However, mail
also had its inadequacies; often the substance of a two-person communication
became something that the whole group needed to consider.  Using group
aliases helped somewhat.

We now feel that an electronic conferencing system is the answer to this type
of need--indeed is tailor-made to address this sort of thing.  However,
with electronic conferencing, all the conference members need to be able to
access the same host system--the one that is running the conference software.
So, our present plan is to enable all the members to be able to log on
remotely to the system in Chapel Hill that runs the conference.  We are
assuming that the telnet command on Internet hosts will provide this 
capability.

Thus, some questions:

(1) Given the fact that most, if not all, of the members are academic faculty,
    and at major state or private universities, is it likely that their
    respective institutions have Internet hosts with telnet capability?
    (NOTE:  In some places, the medical school is not physically part of the
    "main" campus--and can in fact be anywhere from across town to another
    city in the same state.)

(2) If the answer to #1 is 'yes,' can we expect these same institutions to
    grant telnet capability to a general (non-technical) user?  (Most of the
    program participants are not what you would call computer literati.)

(3) If 'yes' is still the answer, is it realistic to expect 'decent' response
    times for interactive sessions with a remote host using telnet.

(4) Should we be considering other options?  (I don't _think_ that our 
    university can be accessed via Telenet or Tymnet.  If, for any individual,
    we can't get remote login capability, we will be asking them to do a
    long-distance dial-up login, but we'd prefer to avoid this since the
    program can't reimburse them for their phone bills.)

Thanks for any information or opinions.

Dean File
Lab for Computing and Cognition
UNC-CH School of Medicine
dfile@ralph.med.unc.edu