HVCN-tech Status Report

This HVCN-tech status report was written by Steve Weiss (srw@hvcn.org) on 8/23/95.

Initial Steps

It has been a long time since the last time I attempted to organize a meeting of the HVCN technical committee. Since then a great many changes have happened, and much progress has been made. I have been remiss in not continually sending out details of this progress as it has been made, so I am attempting to remedy that by publishing this status report. This report is publicly viewable on the web at http://www.hvcn.org/tech0895.html.

On June 1, Prof. Joan Durrance granted HVCN the use of an account on the computer of the U of M School of Information and Library Studies (SILS). I moved our small website from my private area to that location, and we adopted the URL, http://www.sils.umich.edu/~hvcntech. We are grateful to them for offering us that site while we did not have one of our own.

During the rest of June, I developed the Government Infocenter on HVCN, and worked with Arnold Barr, HVCN chair, to finalize arrangements with Isthmus Corporation to share access to their computer for HVCN, until such time as HVCN is prepared to operate its own hardware. At the end of June, on the 29th, a contract was signed which made it possible for us to work with the people of Isthmus Corporation toward development of HVCN using their hardware.

Testing Phase

Although it is tedious, I would encourage you to read or at least skim that contract. It specifies that while we are in the development and testing phase, as we are now, the public will not have access to the system, but a small number of accounts may be created for developers and demos. Some have already been created, and a few others may still be created during this phase.

At this point, with help from Isthmus, we were able to establish name service for our domain (hvcn.org), so that:

But these steps were not completed for nearly a month (July 28) while we waited for the NIC to update the domain record for hvcn.org.

In the interim during July, I developed HVCN's web pages using the SILS computer. On July 28, the entire contents of the HVCN site was transferred to the Isthmus computer to appear as http://www.hvcn.org/, its permanent home. This included a number of projects done by SILS students in a community networking course given by Professor Durrance: The Ann Arbor League of Women Voters, the Washtenaw County Library, and the Washtenaw County Department of Environmental and Infrastructure Services.

What next?

There remains a lot of work to do. Some of it technical, and some not. Volunteers need to be found to maintain and develop HVCN infocenters. HVCN's content, primarily in the organization of community information in those pages, is a key to the acceptance of HVCN. While these particular positions require HTML skills, they require other skills as well. They are more geared toward someone with a library orientation, than a pure technical one. I see it as the responsibility of the HVCN contents committee (as yet forming) to supervise the establishment of volunteers to manage these information centers. The technical committee is involved only peripherally in this.

The Help pages are in serious need of redesign, in my opinion. We are now in a position to configure an account (one has been allocated) to act exactly as the public will see HVCN when they first connect. This should allow us to analyze what problems will be most common, and we should be able to eliminate or defuse these with proper documentation. This is very much the work of the technical committee.

There are currently no graphics on the HVCN pages. I think we should fix this, as a good number of the people who will see our site will not be limited by having only text-mode browsers.

Conferencing is planned for HVCN. We have been offered the rights to use a Web-interface conferencing system, but it is not ready and I am very concerned about it. I have been spending some effort recently planning a web-based conferencing interface for Grex. HVCN may be able to use such a system, as well.

Account creation must be established as a smooth process, with the help of another needed volunteer and some CGI script development. This will be needed before we can be open to the public.

Let's meet

The clear fact is that I need some people who can take on technical projects to help relieve the load. I would like to believe that there is something for everyone, no matter how small. Therefore I would encourage you all to become familiar with the HVCN Web site and then let me know when you can meet. I would like to meet sooner, but because of the pressures of work, I must hold off all of next week. Perhaps we can get together after dinner (7:30 PM) on Wednesday, September 6. If you would prefer another time, please let me know. If you can make it, also let me know. There is plenty of time to adjust this.

If you have questions or comments, please send me email. 


-srw
_________________________________________________________________________
 Steven R. Weiss   |    srw@hvcn.org      | Huron Valley Community Network
Computer Scientist | (313) 995-8250 x5632 |      Technical Committee