Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 08:27:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Cyberdiva <radhik-AT-bgnet.bgsu.edu>
Subject: MediaMOO's 5th Anniversary Symposia and Celebration (fwd)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 17:09:36 -0500 (EST)
From: "Amy S. Bruckman" <asb-AT-cc.gatech.edu>
To: mediamoo-AT-cc.gatech.edu
Subject: MediaMOO's 5th Anniversary Symposia and Celebration


[Sorry for the majordomo spam you may have received.]


[Please forward to appropriate lists.]

Inside the envelope is an engraved invitation.  It reads:


	 Please come to a celebration of MediaMOO's 5th anniversary!
			      January 20th, 1998
			    6:30 PM to 9:30 PM ET
	      At MediaMOO, telnet://mediamoo.cc.gatech.edu:8888


* 6:30 to 7:30 PM ET: 
	Virtual Worlds for Business?
	A discussion with Paul Dourish, Adele Goldberg, and David Leibs

* 7:30 to 8:30 PM ET:
	Who Sped Up the MOO?
	A discussion with Jay Carlson and Ben Jackson

* 8:30 to 9:30 PM ET:
	The Sixth Annual MediaMOO Costume Ball!



			 Virtual Worlds for Business?

		    an online panel discussion featuring:

			   Paul Dourish, Xerox PARC
		       Adele Goldberg, Neometron, Inc.
			 David Leibs, Neometron, Inc.
	   Moderator: Amy Bruckman, Georgia Institute of Technology

January, 20th 1998
6:30 PM ET

Virtual worlds (both text-based and graphical) have many successful
applications to entertainment and education.  But can they be used for
business?  With telecommuting on the rise, can they be used to keep workers at
home in touch?  Can online project management tools help to coordinate
geographically-distributed project teams?  Can online meetings make fewer
face-to-face meetings necessary?  What is gained and what is lost?  Getting
beyond literal copies of existing business practices, what new metaphors and
tools make this technology useful in a practical setting?  Is it really useful
at all?

About the panelists:

Paul Dourish performs research in the areas of collaborative and interactive
systems. At Rank Xerox EuroPARC, he worked on the RAVE media space, and
co-developed Portholes, the first distributed site awareness system, as well
as working on a variety of collaborative tools, toolkits for collaborative
systems, and studies of collaborative activity. At Apple Research, he pursued
an investigation of the relationship between social and technical perspectives
in interactive systems design. His current research at Xerox PARC is concerned
with ad-hoc categorisation and fluid interactions with large document
spaces. He has been a member of MediaMOO since November 1992.

Dr. Adele Goldberg is currently a founder of Neometron, Inc., a startup
company working towards new forms of Intranet support for dynamic knowledge
management.  She is also leading the development of LearningWorks, a freely
available system for creating and delivering curriculum about software
construction. Previously, she served as Chairman of the Board and a founder of
ParcPlace-Digitalk, Inc.  until April, 1996. ParcPlace created application
development environments based on object-oriented technology and sold to
corporate programmers. Prior to the creation of ParcPlace, Adele received a
Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Chicago and spent 14 years
as researcher and laboratory manager at the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center. From 1984-1986, Adele served as president of the ACM, having
previously served as national Secretary and Editor-in-Chief of Computing
Surveys. Solely and with others, Adele wrote the definitive books on the
Smalltalk-80 programming system and has authored numerous papers on project
management and analysis methodology using object-oriented
technology. Dr. Goldberg edited The History of Personal Workstations,
published jointly by the ACM and Addison-Wesley in 1988 as part of the ACM
Press Book Series on the History of Computing which she organized, and
co-edited Visual Object-Oriented Programming with Margaret Burnett and Ted
Lewis. Her most recent book with Kenneth S. Rubin is on software engineering
and is entitled Succeeding With Objects: Decision Frameworks for Project
Management.

David Leibs is currently a founder of Neometron, Inc., a startup company
working towards new forms of Intranet support for dynamic knowledge
management.  He has 20 years experience in creating innovative application
development environments. Prior to founding Neometron, David was Director of
Technical Research at ParcPlace-Digitalk, where he was a chief architect,
systems designer and implementor. To his personal credit is the invention and
implementation of the direct manipulation, graphical construction interface
known as VisualWorks 1.0 (ParcPlace Systems' most successful product).


The forum will be held in the Summer Conference Room, Science Technology and
Society (STS) Centre, on MediaMOO.  
Open telnet://mediamoo.cc.gatech.edu:8888
Then:
  connect guest
  -AT-go summer



			     Who Sped Up the MOO?

		    an online panel discussion featuring:

			      Jay Carlson, Mitre
				 Ben Jackson
	   Moderator: Amy Bruckman, Georgia Institute of Technology

January 20th, 1998
7:30 PM ET

Yowie zowie--LambdaMOO 1.8.0r5 is two to three times faster than its
predecessors!  How'd they do it?  Can it be made even faster?  Come meet
programmers Ben Jackson and Jay Carlson and find out all about what made the
new server so speedy, and what technical challenges lie ahead for the future
of MOO.

The forum will be held in the back room of the Root Lounge on MediaMOO.  
Open telnet://mediamoo.cc.gatech.edu:8888
Then:
  connect guest
  -AT-go Root Lounge
  back



		   The Sixth Annual MediaMOO Costume Ball!

January 20th, 1998
8:30 PM ET

Wear a costume designed by Howard Rheingold.  Order a Metaphysical Pepsi.
Dance a tango, even if you have two left feet.  Celebrate five years of good
friends and good conversations!

The ball will be held in the Ballroom on MediaMOO
Open telnet://mediamoo.cc.gatech.edu:8888
Then:
  connect guest
  -AT-go Ballroom Foyer


We apologize to residents of Europe for the late hour.  Scheduling constraints
of our featured guests required it.


ABOUT MEDIAMOO:

MediaMOO is a text-based virtual reality environment (or "MUD") designed to be
a professional community for media researchers.  People from a wide variety of
backgrounds (computer scientists, anthropologists, artists, writing teachers,
psychologists, journalists, etc.) come to MediaMOO to meet one another, and
discuss the future of new media technologies.  MediaMOO opened its virtual
doors on January 20th, 1993 with the MediaMOO Inaugural Ball.  MediaMOO was
originally hosted at the MIT Media Lab, and is now at the Georgia Institute of
Technology.  MediaMOO is located at telnet://mediamoo.cc.gatech.edu:8888


    *** You are invited to apply to become a regular MediaMOO member! ***
    *** It's free.  Just connect to MediaMOO and type "help request." ***