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Page updated:
10 February 1997
Page owner:
ETO Site Team
"Open" and "Closed" Groups
"Open" telecooperation occurs when people connect with each other across the open Internet "in public" - individuals are free to join or leave the group at will. The open Internet supports many thousands of public discussion areas (email lists or newsgroups) in which people can meet others who share similar interests, exchange views and information, and help each other.Closed telecooperation groups may be informal networks of people who have agreed to work together and to adopt some common approaches, so that newcomers have to commit to the group's agreed processes in order to join, or they may be more formally linked - for example the employees in a company, or the members of a professional body.
Its becoming quite commonplace for networks to be formed on the open Internet and then become more formalised, either to create an enterprise, to pursue a particular project, to jointly market their individual capabilities, to lobby for a political action - any human purpose in fact.