[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 53, Issue 27

[Murray Turoff]

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 at oii.ox.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Message-ID: <153BFE27-DF1F-439F-A488-B03EBC11794C at 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