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Tools for Telecooperation This page aims to give practical help to those wishing to develop their telecooperation skills and to learn about the technology that is available. The popular image of the internet is the World Wide Web, with its multimedia capabilities and rapid access to seemingly endless sources of information, but in fact the Web is just one of many applications of internet technology, which include electronic mail, e-mail discussion groups, live conferencing, file transfer, and access to remote databases. The Teletrade pages at ETO offer a discussion of Enabling Mechanisms, which although aimed at those doing business via the internet, nevertheless covers all of the basic techniques used in telecooperation. Another good starting point if you are new to the internet is The UK Index Beginner's Guide: the Net. The core of telecooperation remains electronic mail, and its variants the e-mail discussion group and news groups. At this site Philip Bogdonoff of the World Bank Electronic Media Center offers Suggestions for Managing Mailing List Discussions, while Sylvia Caras of 'InterNIC News' provides a useful introduction to Starting and Owning a Mailing List If you haven't yet decided on the e-mail system you want to use, you could do worse than to look at Pegasus Mail, a widely used and free piece of software developed in New Zealand by David Harris, or Eudora Light, a free version of the commercial product originally developed for the Apple MAC. With the development of the Web come new techniques for on-line discussion and cooperation. Netscape's Communicator 4 , for instance, adds a live conferencing facility to the existing e-mail and newsgroup options of previous Netscape releases. For the more technically minded, new software is appearing that allows web-pages to be turned into interactive bulletin boards. In all cases you will need some programming skill, and a good working relationship with the owner of your web-server, as all need the ability to use Common Gateway Interface (cgi) scripts. Some useful examples of these are: WWWBoard A single customizable script that turns a web-page into an electronic 'whiteboard'. HyperNews HyperNews is a cross between the hypermedia of the WWW and Usenet News. Readers can reply to base articles they read in the HyperNews web, and browse through the messages written by other people. Frontier Frontier is an integrated development environment for building and managing websites, with the capacity to allow relatively unskilled users to build interactive applications. WebBoard Where the above systms are free, WebBoard is a commercial product from O'Reilly Associates Software. For a more comprehensive list of WWW bulletin board systems, look at The CGI Resource Index The Telecooperation Pages at European Telework Online are managed by Sergei Parinov.