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Page updated:
25 January 2000

   
TELEWORKING

Why does European Telework Online use simple email discussion lists - why not something more sophisticated?

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Why does European Telework Online use simple email discussion lists - why not something more sophisticated?

This question arises in our online discussion and in questions to the web site team. From time to time people have suggested that we use a more sophisticated approach.

The answer has to do with (a) the target audience for the discussion forum; (b) criteria arising from the needs of the audience; (c) Internet performance considerations; and (d) the resources available to support the forum.

Target audience

The target audience for the European Telework Online forum is very broad, ranging from experienced telework specialists, through managers in industry, government policy makers, researcher and teachers, to individuals who may be interested in telework but currently know little about it. At any one time all of these groups are among the subscriber base of around 500 people in some 50 countries.

There are also wide variations in subscribers' access to the Internet, the performance of their local technology, and their personal skills and experience as users of the Internet. Some subscribers have reliable, high speed access from company or government offices or universities for which the individual user incurs no cost, others are private subscribers in countries with high telephone charges and fragile access to the Internet, using slow speed modems and low performance PCs. Some subscribers are technology specialists with ten or more years experience of online working, others started using email only recently and are still feeling their way.

We take the view that all these different kinds of people have a worthwhile contribution to make to the general pool of knowledge and understanding. The most naive question from the newcomer can spark a discussion that has experts disagreeing among themselves, often the most fruitful for both the experts and the onlookers!

Criteria for the forum

From our understanding of the target audience and the subscriber base, we set the following criteria for the way the forum operates:
  1. Easy to join and leave;

  2. Requires no special hardware or software - any Internet user can participate;

  3. No new technical skills to learn - if you can join, you can participate;

  4. Accessible for people with low performance connections;

  5. Low cost for people paying their own access costs.

Simple email is the most obvious solution given these criteria.

Internet performance considerations

Today there are significant issues about Internet performance between countries. In many European countries, access to and from the United States is better than access to and from another country in Europe. Some of our subscribers in developing countries have only occasional access and poor quality routings. This has led us to avoid relying on methods that require the user to be online for finding, reading and responding to messages (eg web based conferencing).

Resource constraints

The main activities of European Telework Online are privately funded or based on voluntary efforts. Our support from the European Commission via the ETD initiative covers less than a quarter of the costs of running the service. We charge no subscriptions. Given the resource constraints its not appropriate for us to provide services that require a lot of learning by users and would need substantial effort to assist subscribers to make good use of the service. We need to apply the main part of our support to the public forum to the positive management activities of keeping out advertisements and off topic messages, and helping users to adopt and sustain good practice according to the site's best practice rules.

Conclusions

To date, we have concluded that simple technology (email list) plus committed management effort are the best combination in the interests of the subscriber base as a whole.

Individuals in the site team also participate in other forums - newsgroups, webconferencing and proprietary methods such as CompuServe and AOL, First Class etc. We experience the benefits but also the drawbacks of the different approaches. The option of moving the open discussion onto a more advanced platform is kept continuously under review. Suggestions about other platforms should please be addressed to eto-info@eto.org.uk; debate about whether or not the current approach is appropriate is not encouraged in the public forum, please see the forum's rules.

The site provides links to other relevant discussion places on the Internet, if you know of any useful ones not already listed please write to eto-info@eto.org.uk.

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