Online conferencing

Online conferencing is conversation held in writing, in company, over time. A participant connects—by modem, later by telnet or the web—reads everything the others have written since the last visit, answers what calls for an answer, and leaves; the conversation stays behind on a central machine, accumulating. Nothing about it is live. A response may come in an hour or in a week, and the form is built for exactly that: the writing waits. Both works this edition keeps—Scibe here, and Item 8 at item8.org—were written this way, and their shape is the shape of the rooms they were written in.

The structure is a grammar of three levels. A system carries conferences, each a room devoted to a subject and tended by hosts. Within a conference, a member opens an item (on the WELL, a topic) with a first posting; everyone else answers in responses, which arrive in order, signed and dated, one after another. That is the whole machine—and it is enough. Scibe’s sixty-seven lexias keep the grammar on their faces: each stands under the header it was posted with, conference and writer and date, because in a conferencing system the header is how a reader knows whose voice is speaking, and when they spoke.

The form was invented more than once. At the University of Illinois, PLATO had threaded discussion by 1973—David R. Woolley’s PLATO Notes, one of the first online message boards—and live character-by-character chat the same year in Doug Brown’s Talkomatic. At the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Murray Turoff built EIES between 1974 and 1978 on his earlier EMISARI system, a deliberate experiment in computer-mediated communication; it reached more than two thousand subscribers, carried the first completely online master’s degree in 1985, and ran until 2000. And at the University of Michigan in 1975, graduate student Robert Parnes built CONFER—the ancestor that matters most here, because the systems in this wiki descend from it directly.

CONFER’s descendants are named in its record: Caucus, PicoSpan, and YAPP are its progeny. PicoSpan became The WELL’s software; Caucus became the software of The Meta Network and of ARTS WIRE. Cliff Figallo, sorting web conferencing software in the 1990s, grouped the CONFER-descended products as the “WELL-style” family: discussions held as linear chains of responses, displayed as one continuous stream of text. The kinship among the rooms in this wiki is documented descent, not resemblance—one Michigan program, carried to both coasts.

Conferencing shaped a kind of writing. Because a posting was permanent, signed, and answered by people who had time to think, it rewarded composition over reaction: the considered paragraph, the quotation answered point by point, the story told whole. Because the rooms were tended—hosts on the WELL, conference organizers on TMN, a staff who worked as a virtual office on ARTS WIRE—the talk had memory and manners; because names were real, it had consequences. Judy Malloy’s ask in 1994—windows on the world, sent to a sickroom—could only have been made in such a room, and Scibe is what the room answered.

The systems lasted: CONFER was widely used until 1999, EIES until 2000, and Caucus and the WELL both survive—the WELL still conferencing, Caucus still maintained as open source. The grammar outlasted them all: conference, item, and response is the skeleton under every forum, thread, and comment stream that followed, a debt the Caucus entry takes up under its legacy.

Sources and further reading