Date: Sat, 15 Feb 92 17:33:29 PST
From: Mitch Kapor <mkapor@well.sf.ca.us>
Subject: File 7--Mitch Kapor Response to "Bury Usenet" (Intertek Reprint)

Somewhere between the intimacy of island universe conferencing systems
like the WELL (an electronic bulletin board in California) and the
anarchic ocean of USENET lies the future of computer conferencing.
USENET's problems are legion and unlikely to go away. What may succeed
are new generations of software and conferencing systems built upon
the lessons and experience, both positive and negative, of a
multiplicity of existing systems.

The WELL works much better than USENET as a source of informed
discourse for several reasons:

o It's hosted on a single system, avoiding the lag of distributed
  systems.
o People pay to be there. This weeds out the single largest source
  of noise.
o Conferences are all hosted, which acts as a loose control
  mechanism.
o The management of the system realizes it's running a digital
  gathering place.

The WELL has problems too. It's insular, its user interface is nothing
to be proud of and its telecommunications access cost is excessive if
you don't live in the Bay Area.

If these problems were addressed, there's no reason in principle why
the example of the WELL couldn't be more widely applied. It wouldn't
be USENET, but maybe that's OK.

I envision a system which is on the Internet and thus reachable from
anywhere on the Internet, a system which has a graphical user
interface (in addition to whatever the hardcore users want), whose
conferences are hosted, and which charges a nominal--say a dollar an
hour--usage charge. This software may have many separate
instantiations, in different locations, serving different needs and
interests.

In fact, this is a brief sketch of a design idea for a development
project we hope to begin within the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF) in 1992.

Mitch Kapor
EFF co-founder


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