Another outreach proposal (89 lines)

Aug 10 15:58 UTC 1994

I have come up with another proposal germ to get Grex more into community
service in line with the founders' goals.  Again, this idea is by no means
fully formed, and I'd like to start and shepherd a discussion to get it
into shape, or find out why it won't work.

__________________________________________________________

          Grex Education proposal #2

I propose that Grex become involved in the task of connecting people to
their federal, state and local governments.  Inasmuch as we provide
members with a suite of Internet tools, we already play a passive role in
this endeavor, since adventurous, knowledgeable or otherwise enabled
individuals can seek out for themselves ways to access government
information, documents, or contact government representatives on their
own.  This is however haphazard at best, and does not represent a
systematic effort to get people involved in the process of running the
country, a goal which is worthy of our time and effort.

Therefore, I propose that Grex seek out ways to help people find the array
of resources at their disposal, show them how to use these resources, and
in general facilitate the exchange of information between the people and
the government that is supposed to represent us.  Obviously, this is a
complicated process, and we will have to discuss many different aspects of
design and implementation for such a policy, but I think that the end
justifies the effort.  If there is sufficient interest, I volunteer to
coordinate this discussion as well as the AAPS discussion already begun. 
The two may well dove-tail nicely anyway.

As this is not a formal proposal for membership vote at this point, the
discussion should be free of any time limits other than those necessary to
get the project from the planning to the execution stage without allowing
inertia to eat it.

     Chris, who has no idea what he's getting into.
     <rueful grin>

response 2 of 28:

Aug 10 18:55 UTC 1994

Ok.  There are at least two parallel tracks we should start investigating.
 The first is to pull together a resource l of things you can find on the
Net, (e.g. gophers, URLs Email lists/servers/addresses for prominent folk)
etc into a systematically organized setup.  My original idea was to create
a Lynx page to serve as the base for this.  Other organization methods
could of course be chosen.

Next.  We need to figure out how to get the word out to people that we are
providing this service.  That means getting the word out to people here in
town, to people on the Net coming to us from wherever, and to people who
might find this a valuable enough resource to join us above other public
access Unix sites.  I haven't a clue how to do this part.

The third (good thing I said at least two tracks) thing to do is to pull
together a list of people who would be willing to teach classes, and
figure out the best way to support them.  Again I'm not sure how to
proceed, since this would obviously be volunteer work, and not everyone
has just loads of free time.  

There is the list of preliminary things we'd need to do to make this idea
a reality.  I'm not sure how best to organize the discussion, but I think
the best way would be to find two other volunteers.  I could run the
resource discussion, and the other two could run the outreach and
volunteer coordination discussions, or of course, we could use some other
permutation.  Perhaps this is best broken up into 3 separate items, or
perhaps we need an outreach conference to lump all the various outreach
proposals into one place.

I'm linking this discussion to Internet.

response 4 of 28:

Aug 14 15:07 UTC 1994

Chris, if you know how to use lynx, look up my homepage.  I have a
prototype resource list of the sort you were mentioning.  Obviously
it needs work.

What I would like to see is several different menu pages, catagorized
by topic, age group and resource.  That way a person could find all
the usenet articles concerning art or the ftp archives for third grade
math without having to wade through asn incredibly long list.

I'd also like to see use get a gopher area.  That way the resources
we find would be accessible through gopher or the WWW.  That's
something that I have mentioned to staff, which they agree is a 
good idea and are willing to implement, but won't happen until
other higher-priority tasks are taken care of.

BTW, anyone can set up hypertext pages.  They're fun and easy (once
you get the idea of the syntax).  I'd be glad to assist anyone who
would like to write some hypertext.

If you'd like to get a hypertext listing of educational resources,
why not copy my prototype file and add to it.  I haven't had the
time to work on it lately, and it is something that would definitely
be appreciated by many educators!

response 6 of 28:

Aug 20 08:51 UTC 1994

I'd be willing to help out with the outreach -- letting people know we're
here has been my major contribution.  Letting them know about our
civic progrma would be easy and fun!

response 8 of 28:

Jan 7 17:47 UTC 1995

Hi all, I'm back, and still interested in this discussion and proposal. 
Since August, more federal stuff has come on line and the Gingrinch,
(bless his fascist little heart) has made it a policy to dissemenate more
info.  So, let's get cracking again.

I will be writing about this effort in the newsletter that is coalescing
over in COOp, so that should get the word out to the folk.  More when I've
had a chance to unbury myself.

     Chris

response 10 of 28:

Jan 28 20:45 UTC 1995

Is Grex currently accessible from gopher or http or whatever (as you may be
able to tell, I'm not very familiar with this kind of thing)

response 12 of 28:

Jan 29 13:28 UTC 1995

People elsewhere can reach Grex via gopher, http, and a number of other
methods.

response 14 of 28:

Jan 30 05:06 UTC 1995

Right, but #10 asked if Grex is accessible *from* gopher or http, not
whether Grex has those services available.  Hm.
Mark (lilmo) -- Were you asking about gopher/http/etc into Grex, or
on Grex?

response 16 of 28:

Jan 31 11:19 UTC 1995

Hmm, typing !gopher appears to run a gopher client.

response 18 of 28:

Feb 1 11:29 UTC 1995

Yes, it's just a client.  It connects to the home gopher server at the
University of Minnesota, and it's been around for a while.  But who needs
gopher when we've got WWW?

response 20 of 28:

Feb 4 17:59 UTC 1995

popcorn -- My roommate has a WWW browser, and a gopher, and my question was
(in essence) whether I would be able to use either of those to call Grex.

response 22 of 28:

Feb 4 19:09 UTC 1995

Valerie, we jut concluded (further up) that you cannot reach grex with
a gopher client, as there is not a server here. You may have meant
telnetting *from* a gopher server to grex. Are we mistaken?

response 24 of 28:

Feb 5 08:03 UTC 1995

I have them all as separate clients on this Powerbook. I'm now using
NCSA Telnet 2.6 (client), but just a while ago I went hunting with
TurboGopher 1.0.8b4: didn't find a Grex gopher listed (as expected),
but found one for ArborNet and another for UMCC. They have rather
complete documentation for their organization and activities on their
gopher servers. I then cranked up NCSA Mosaic 1.0.3 - and could not
find anything in Michigan - the indexing is terrible (as far as I have
been able to find it): its OK if you know the URL, but frustrating
(and slow!) to search geographically (or, does someone know where the
index is?).