The Virtual Workshop is about collaboration. It extends, electronically, the means to convene and facilitate work and ideas throughout a community of interest (March 95 speech by the Chief of the Forest Service). Some considerations:
Think of a three-story house. The top floor is a library for the public. The ground floor is a workshop for partners . The basement is a lab for internal activities. The intent of the Virtual Workshop is to facilitate communication and collaboration amongst partners at the ground level.
A floorplan for the house would show various rooms. Each room on the ground floor is a virtual meetingplace for a "community of interest." Workshop participants in a given room convene to exchange ideas and discuss a particular topic. A room may be divided into sub-rooms as a topic expands. Several rooms may alternatively combine into a super-room as topics merge or integrate. The floorplan is dynamic -- it changes as needs evolve.
As topics in the Workshop "mature" or stablilize, they may be summarized or aggregated and be taken "upstairs" and placed in the library for the public. Access to some of the rooms may be limited; most are expected to be open to all.
People visit rooms of their choice. They may read what's there; download it; comment on it; pose questions; ask for help; offer products and services; drop off new documents, images, forms; and point Workshop participants to other references (URLs). A moderator may initiate, facilitate, and guide discussions (or a topic may be unmoderated). Top
Taking an ecological approach to managing the nations lands and resources requires good communication, coordination, and collaboration amonst a wide variety of interests. Today, with the different histories, cultures, missions, and technologies of the various government agencies and NGOs, that is a difficult challenge. The premise of the Virtual Workshop is that if people could more easily locate information about a subject or a piece of land; if they could better determine who is working on what project or who has built what system; if they could compare approaches and objectives and data needs; if they could openly convene and deliberate over common issues and interests . . . then they would be better able to discover commonalities, resolve issues, and work together. Top
The USDA Forest Service is sponsoring this initial exploratory prototype. Other organizations are encouraged to also join as sponsors. The payoff lies in the ability to network, share, and collaborate across organizational, geographical, and functional boundaries. While this process may well improve collaboration on virtually any topic, we propose to restrict the scope of this Workshop, at least initially, to resource conservation topics (such as ecosystem-based assistance and management). Top
There are some roles to sort out. Sponsors provide leadership and resources for carrying out the objectives of the Workshop. Stewards are responsible for the content in designated topic areas. Moderators initiate, facilitate, and guide topic discussions as appropriate. Participants, well, participate in topic discussions. What else?
And some protocols. Like how to create new topic areas (rooms)? How to sub-divide and combine them as necessary? How and when (or if) to summarize or aggregate the results of topic discussions? How to structure and organize topics to make them easy to reference? How to provide access from a variety of computing platforms, maintain integrity, manage growth? These (and more) are all things yet to be figured out.
Then there is the matter of technology. There are a number of electronic collaboration technologies coming into being on the Internet. The one used currently by the Virtual Workshop is called HyperNews. HyperNews is forms-based; operates over the WWW, but provides for email participation; can be either public or private (selected membership); depicts threads by indenting responses; enables sharing of messages, documents, and HTML (hypertext). Check out the HyperNews home page for more information. This is all certain to change, so stay tuned.