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>

28 responses total.

Like most good ideas that take more than one person to carry them out,
this requires some leadership. Tell us what we can do, Chris.

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.

As someone new to telecom via computer I might say that the first
BBS menu that you display is probably where many newusers end up.
Many probably learn to use email. If a very clear title were built
into the first BBS menu like "How to contact and influence your 
government" you would lead people into a specific menu area that
could be developed to make it easy to choose methods and resources
and tutorials.

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!

Thanks Carl, I'll check it out.  I'm going to learn HTML some time soon,
and then I'll help put this together.  Once we've got a good resource set,
we should probably get it on the Grex home page, and/or in the menu shell
top-level menu.

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!

I'm going to have intermittent access for a while, so until then, I'll try
and get something accomplished, but who knows.

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

Per request this has been linked from Internet to Co-op.

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)

Grex has no gophers, but it supports outgoing lynx, and items on grex
can be accessed with lynx, mosaic, etc.

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

True, but that gopher is a telnet connection established via a gopher. Grex
does not run a gopher server, does it?

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?

I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between grex
having a client and/or a server, for these various IP protocols. Maybe
we should have a table somewhere of which we have of each, and what
"permissions" are needed to run each. I lose track myself. 

The distinctions can appear to be subtle. Persons can telnet from
a gopher server elsewhere to grex, but we do not support a gopher
server (or client). We support both http server and client. Are
there any IP protocols for which we support either a server or client,
but not both? A table showing all this would be pretty useful!

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

Holy cow! You're right! I presume that is just a client, with no server?
Now, where do we make the availability of this known? I thought users
here just telnetted to a gopher server elsewhere, in order to tunnel
gopherland.

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?

Gopher is faster and requires less reading - especially for sites where
you are going to end up in a gopher anyway using www. 

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.

Yep, both of those could get you here (though it's probably easier to
just telnet directly to cyberspace.org, if that's an option).

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?

I meant that if you've got a machine where you can run gopher and a web
browser, you can also probably telnet from it.

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?).

I think you can reach Grex from the web by going to Web Central at CERN
and looking under Computing.  Probably srw or carl could give you more
details....

My homepage has a link to CERN's Michigan page.  Don't remember the URL
but your[D

Whoops.  To continue, you're free to look.

Thanks. I did some surfing earlier tonight, and now have the WWW
Summary page in my hotlist. So, I found the index, but finding it
was not as easy as via gopher - though I expect that to improve.

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