Thanks William, it has been some time since we talked and it is good to hear from you. Groups in EMASARI was very weak, and it was really EIES the electronic Information Exchange System that had groups as a fully integrated structure including group messaging as in 1976 we had to buil EIES with its own internal message system. As an R&D system we could tailor individual interfaces wiht unique cababilites for each user group. We could transfer prividledges or access rights by distributing them to teh group. Any content could be references in any communication with a type of html we had in the system to provide hypertext linkages that could either be displayed wihtin the text or left to be triggered by teh user. It also had a full chat cabablity as did EMIASARI in 1971. The Network nation was reprinted in 1993 by MIT press and is still available from MIT press or Amazon. We established in the past few years on the NJIT libaray an archive for all our early research reports including controlled expeirments and field trails evaluations as well as user manuals for the many altenraive subsystems we built. A complete EMISARI manual is there too. This will get you there http://library.njit.edu/archives/cccc-materials/ if you dont record this go to the library at njit and lookd at service and collections and one of them will be the archive of the Computer Conferencing and Communications Center from 1975 though 1999 if you look at some of the evaluation studies these reports contain all the scales used and the procedures and represent some interesting resources for phd students. Besides the scientific networks that used eies there were a lot of social network type things going on at the same time between teh different communties. Things like poetry writing conferences, collaborative story writing using eies pen names, and discussions of a lot of popular subjects. The first real public social sysetms which evolved from EIES by Staurt Brand who wrote teh whole earth software catablog using groups on eies to collaborate on material, was the Well which he developed commerically and had the many social network groups inlcuding a number of bands and their follers like the Grateful Dead. The Well still exists i believe. Since 2003 i have been going back to my EMISARI work and doing Emergency Management Information Systems. The government has no organizational memory about what it once could do very well and how it was done back in OEP in the 60s and early 70s. The paper on DERMIS on my website (in JITTA also) tells why i went back to this area to try and show what can be done with the right approach the emergency management problem. On my website is a recent report roxanne and i did for NLM on the information overload that the emergency management community is facing on the Web. That full report of 169 pages (a one round delphi) is on my website and make interesting reading for some of you i am sure. We could not suggest solutions in the report as that was not allowed by the sponosors but I just gave a paper at WEB2008 during the ICIS meeting in paris and it has a suggested solutions in terms of user controlled recommender systems of a specific nature. If anyone is interested I will send it to you. Springer is publishing it in teh near future. A group of us started a professional community of practice in this area called ISCRAM, check out iscram.org for four years of proceedings and it is now an affilated AIS conference as well. Roxanne and i are sort of amazed about how little many current researchers know about anyof this early work and many findings that are still relevant for current reserach issues. Message: 3
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:55:30 +0000 From: William Dutton <william.dutton@oii.ox.ac.uk> Subject: Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <153BFE27-DF1F-439F-A488-B03EBC11794C@oii.ox.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
I think Murray Turoff is referring to the system that he pioneered, called the Emergency Management Information Systems And Reference Index (EMISARI). See: Hiltz and Turoff, (1978), The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley), also see: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz had a vision that was decades ahead of the times.
Bill
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff