24. What changes could be made to improve the computer conference? It was a little too long and too intense. It might have been good to have a break in the middle, or to just have it be shorter. Some discussion participants did not include their names and/or affiliations making it difficult to understand who they were and what the context was for their comments. I noted that an informal "general discussion" developed over the weekend at the end of Session 2. This was a nice development. Perhaps this could become a regular part. Dynamic discussion rather than e-mail. Too much recopying of the "jw said: Blah" style Request that participants not include so much text from other's comments in their replies; require that figures, etc. be encoded according to uniform standards; make the conference shorter NO CHANGES--WILL GET BETTER ON SECOND TRY I can't think of any. I thought the organization was excellent. I suggest that some respondents need to exercise self restraint in the use of introductory messages and sign-off signatures. Initially one could send out longer abstracts, sufficient enough to allow people to decide which papers they are interested in. Some of the ones used here were too short. Did you send the abstracts to everyone automatically? I have forgotten, but I would. One might suggest that the participants make a calendar of when they will want their mail on and when off, depending on which papers are of interest. This will avoid flooding their email with uninteresting mail. Participants who want to comment on a previous participant's comments should not reproduce the whole of the previous participant's (perhaps quite lengthy) message, but only the salient bits. This will reduce the size of the mail burden each participant receives. Perhaps a group of papers could be discussed at once, particularly interesting would be a group of papers with opposing views. this may help focus the discussion a little more. It maybe however, that an unfocussed discussion is better. This appears to be uncharted waters. 15 papers seemed a bit too many, although I would not object to another conference of the same length. I'm not sure short questions and answers need to be separated from short discussion sessions, but maybe that is easier on the authors. Considering weekends, vacations, and internet delays, it would be better to allow 3 days for discussion rather than 2, and to "allow" some overlap for successive papers(it occurred anyway). By the time for general discussion at the end of the conference, I have to review papers to reignite my interest; it is better to have discussion when things are fresh on one's mind. TO PROVIDE AT THE VERY BEGINNING INSTRUCTIONS FOR RECOVERING ALL THE GRAPHICS FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT EXPERTS. A COMMON SOFTWARE COULD BE USED BY THE PARTICIPANTS. A COMMON SOFTWARE FOR TEXTS LIKE WORDPERFECT; FOR DATA LIKE LOTUS OR QUATTRO; FOR GRAPHICS LIKE QUATTRO OR ONE AVAILABLE THROUGH SHARE WARE. As the technical aspects of electronic mail improve, this kind of con- ference will become much more effective. You deserve a great deal of credit for organizing this one and making it run as well as it did We hope this will be the first of many conferences. This was my first experience using e-mail, so I was using it as a learning experience. I found it very rewarding, and expect to continue using e-mail when it makes sense. Many of the discussion comments and ideas in the papers will be passed on to our Dean for consideration, as well as shared with other faculty. The fact that it is in writing, rather than just notes from a conference, makes it easier to organize. At some point, the number of contributors (or length of the contributions to The discussions) will have to be limited. There were probably less than 40 people who actually contributed to the discussion. This appears to be about 10%. This percentage will grow , as will the number of participants in the future. Imagine the info overload if there were 100 people contributing to the OLD Tools vs New methods debate. I can't think of a good way to do this, however. Since this is my first conference, it took me a while to decide where to store things for easy retrieval. Some guidelines from experienced conferees to newcomers would be helpful along these line. Make the info more accessible with Gopher, which is much more convenient to use than FTP. I found that some binary files would appear as ASCII files and be unretrievable with Gopher. And some ASCII files would terminate and therefore not be retrievable. It would help me access and store messages properly if the subject of each message included the paper number. It would help in retrieving files if the first 8 characters of all file names were unique since I retrieve into a PC from the server. (this is obviously a PC limitation, not a MAC). Emphasize several times to newcomers and new users of email that the automatic reply option may send messages to unintended people. Explain what they have to do to reply to only the original sender. Maybe require that a simple one or two word message be placed at the top of each message sent to CHEMCONF, and have the listserver reject all messages without this particular introduction. That would eliminate the messages that get sent unintentionally to everyone by the automatic reply on email menus. Perhaps encourage shorter posts during discussions...they are more likely to be read. I think that the short question period should have included all papers in a particular session and gone for fewer days. It took too long to get to the actual discussion. I found that I had forgotten what the particulars were about a paper before the discussion got going. Give directions for using Gopher, it is a lot easier than directly dealing with ftp, and it makes our University Computing Services people a lot happier! Might it be possible to open another parallel list for discussion to continue when the official discussion period is over.? I missed some time due to vacation and summer school constraints that I might have been more involved, after the official two day period. Instead of having a single paper each two days, I think five papers over a two week period would allow for more flexibility. On days when I was out of town or busy off-campus, I missed the opportu- nity to get in my "ShortQuestions" I'm not sure how to handle this, but a brief intro to downloading from the host system would have been very helpful (for example, I didn't realize for a long time that the directory designations for the umd ftp site were case-sensitive Perhaps Strings could be suggested by the authors instead of the questions at the end of the papers. I would have liked to seen more papers relating to secondary science education. (Oddly Paper #6 did not hold my attention.) (How many high school teachers were participating?) Include a suggestion in the initial message that the most effective e-mail letters are fairly short. I thing the general format is fine. have more time have someone put discussion in chronological order Keep replies succint, perhaps use abstracts. It would be nice to be able to peel of the general noise and only take part in specific discussion forums. Could we have sub-LISTSERVers running for each paper. I don't want to be limited to personal e-mail, thus a small forum seems most appropriate. perhaps fewer papers and have fall winter spring summer sessions for just a 2-3 week interval. Do not include more papers in future conferences. A larger number of papers will be just too overwhelming, especially if one wants to have a peek at the different discussions going on. You never know what goodies they'll give you. Perhaps, very specialized conferences are the way to go -- keep the range of topics very narrow so that participants are not overwhelmed with a tremondous amount of information. Once people become comfortable with e-mail, the amount of discussion will "explode". I probably spent more time on this conference than indicated above. I didn't really monitor my time very accurately. If anything, the numbers given above are on the low side. Combine short questions and discussion. I thought that separation was a little artificial, although I understood the reason for it. This would save a little time. It was a well-run conference, especially for a first try. I don't have many suggestions. 1. You might try breaking the longer conference documents (such as "Welcome") into shorter ones and sending them out at different times. They might be read more carefully and absorbed better. 2. As I mentioned in another message, include reference to materials at info.md.edu in introductory mailings for other conferences. Find a way to work in more time for discussion of past papers or issues. Provide a way to thread discussions much as Network News Groups do. I orgainized the discussion by paper, but for paper 9 in which there were 91 discussion postings ranging over a variety of topics, this approach broke down. Obtain better papers. The quality of the conference depends upon the quality of the papers. I think it was Ok as it was. A lot of work for all involved. I think it went very well as done (I think that a great deal was learned from the early trial in February). I think that another of about the same format should be tried before extensive changes are made. It would have been better if more of the "lurkers" had participated. From the list, it was clear that many people kept their heads down. Not a lot I can say. I have found idea interesting, but the topic (section 3) is not one in which I have any expertise. Have more network conferences! I would like to see the whole process speeded up a little, despite the fact that I also liked the time to think. The conference protocol was carefully thought out and organized, but anything can seem tedious when stretched out for a whole summer. I would change the short question session. Have questions sent directly to the authors and then have their response (with the questions and the source) begin the discussion period. This would allow more discussion time which I felt was the most valuable part of the conference. Alternatively would it be possible to carry out parallel sessions by using "sub-lists". This might make it easier to only listen to topics of interest. I am very interested in the ideas for exchanging more complex documents, hence my questions about PINE and NuPop. It appears that there are two standards MIME and binhex. We all need to push our computer centers towards providing support for this type of exchange. I am working on a book with someone across the country and being able to exchange ideas electronicly will (I hope) cut lots of time from the development process. It would also be useful for a conference like this to exchange more complex documents than ASCII allows. It might be possible to schedule question and discussion times for several papers in parallel (eg. several streams, with one paper per stream at the same time). In that way you could extend question and discussion periods, without having the conference dragging on for too long. Everyone can choose which discussion they want to participate in. The beauty of an electronic conference, as opposed to a traditional one is that if you can spare the time you can join all discussions. authors should test that their software is sufficiently standard to be FTP'd or e-mailed so that it will work on the majority of the machines. questions re time and number of interventions etc are meaningless -- who keeps track -- I respond to my e-mail multiple times during the day and it would have taken more time to do the bookkeeping than to participate. For me personnally, I need to get the operation of downloading the papers down so that it is not a problems. Also must have corrected the problems that we have had here with our mail/network system. Please continue this interaction. Please present us all summary information on what is available out there via our terminals. More information on the general use of computers for improving productivity and discussion on teaching techniques on getting people to understand the value of computers and how to use them. I liked it the it was. It was already better than the trail session. Other time of the year would be better for me. I am interested in the results of someone who was going to try something like this with his students and a external specialist. Perhaps you could make a paper for non-USA listmembers how the american system works and what terms like PChem etc mean. I think the format used is satisfactory. I would like to see some way for threads to spin off the main conference just to keep the E-mail load manageable. However, that would require conference joiners to be somewhat proficient in the E-mail, which many appear not to be at this stage. papers should be accessible with special features encoded (and decoder provided) rather than as separate files for text/graphics/programs. I am usually an overly critical person. I'm at a loss to come up with suggestions! Everything went so smooth, at least from my lurking viewpoint, that I don't think major changes are needed. Of course, this opinion springs from someone that didn't read most of the papers. I did have some trouble with viewing some graphics in the mini-conference, so that probably kept me from attempting it in this meeting. organization was good--maybe filter the flow to purge out mail mistakes and endless repetitions of the same "can somebody tell me how to...." queries The questionnaire in its presented form defeated the economy of time through electronic delivery. Perhaps the next conference will have a user friendly final survey. because I was gone part of the summer, I fell behind in some discussions I would very much like to have particpated in. How about doing this in the spring? Some helpful information regarding LISTSERVES, USENETS, other references and workshops has surfaced during the discussions. Would it be realistic to attempt to summarize these and distribute them at the end of the conference?