After five english ECO's, here is the one and only ECA: Electronic Comunication for Anarchy. It's purpose is to give an impression about what happened around electronic mail, internet and conferences during the Alternative Forum.
GreenNet had an account opened for the Alternative Forum, called 'guest19', so that the participants of the FA could experience what kind of information can be found on APC conferences.
Workshops on the Internet have been given on thursday and friday afternoon. They where visited by one group of five, one group of seven, a group of three and a Dutch radio reporter.
The workshop demonstrated how you can use internet (=direct link with all other computers in the world that use this system) to:
We connected to 'gn.apc.org' (GreenNet), as described above, and to 'rs.internic.net' (a public address directory) and we tried to connect to 'worldbank.org', but that was, of course, impossible. The worldbank has blocked their information for users of the internet...
Gopher is a system that displays a list of topics on the screen. If you choose one of them, you either get the information that it describes, or you are automatically connected with another computer that displays a new list of more detailed topics. In the workshop, we made a connection with the World Bank Public Information Center, where they had summaries of all their GEF projects and EIA-reports and Economic Sector Reports. If one of these summaries looked interesting to you, you can order the entire report by mail (stupidly enough not through the internet !!!).
If you make a connection with 'rs.internic.net' then there are a number of commands that enable you to find out about users from some other systems. Not all users, because every system decides for itself if it wants to publish their users addresses in this 'public directory'. GreenNet users can not be found in this way.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to show other intersting features of the Internet, such as:
The IRC is an ongoing live 'chatbox' between internet users all over the world. If you type a line in your computer, all other users can see waht you write, and you can see what all other users are 'typing'. In that way, you can talk with other people that can be miles away about culture, religion, the environment... but most people on the IRC still talk about games, dating and sex. (The IRC is heavily dominated by USA-teenagers who have free acces to internet through their university...)
The WWW is basically a gopher system, but it has a very nice graphic interface (=what you see on the screen) and you can handle it with a mouse instead of typing in (mysterious) commands (like wais, finger, ftp...). WWW is also able to show pictures, short movies and to produce sound. If you have enough money, you can have your own WWW server (=provider) and put all material about the Foro on it: speeches, announcements, reports, press releases (just like in APC conferences), but also pictures, short video clippings, radio interviews... A press agency (like Reuters) could then browse through all that information and 'download' parts of the radio interview and the video !
People from GreenNet (UK), Euskalnet and Altercom (Basque Country), Nodo50 (Madrid) and Antenna (NL), have met eachother, worked together, and exchanged experiences, and this will have a great impact on the future of Spanish E-mail connections.
At one time, we have asked a friend in the Netherlands to phone us (so it wouldn't cost FA94 anything) and to send us a program that we needed urgently. The connection lasted 5 minutes and the program worked perfectly.
40 people had an account on 'WINDMAIL' (connection with NODO50) and where able to send and receive messages directly (with a 3-9 hour delay) to and from their home organisations and friends.
In the first week, about 400 email messages have been exchanged between participants and their home offices !
By Ace Suares