Main site http://goole.octacon.co.uk/proj/telemart
Also view: http://www.cobalt.gotland.com/w-telema.htm and http://www.fastfwd.com/telemart.html
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By Jeremy Millard
Europe’s great and good thinkers and practitioners on telework, as well as some officials and policy makers not previously involved, met in Luxembourg at the end of June under the patronage of Jacques Santer, President of the European Commission, which also sponsored the event. The object: apart from putting Luxembourg on the telework map, to assess the current European status on telework and to underline the commitment of Europe (represented by the Commission) to boldy face the challenges which telework is presenting, it is said, to us all.
The title of the congress could just as well have been “change, chance and challenge”, because about the only view to which everybody could readily adhere was that new technology is changing the way Europeans work, whether we like it or not. Here, however, agreement ended, the camp dividing largely into the “hard optimists”, on the one hand, who see the new technology as providing immense potential for work and growth and view with alarm calls for caution and regulation, and the “soft pessimists”, on the other, who see dangers ahead for individuals, especially the excluded, and who wish to proceed cautiously and to regulate and control the changes taking place. Some views, of course, also filled the wide gap between these extremes.
The congress opened with a series of visions under the chair of Gaston Schaber (CEPS/Instead), who used much time defining the different types and interpretations of telework, the usefulness of which is about as great as discussing the length of a piece of string, but which helped to underline the great diversity of subject matter and difficulty of pinning down the beast. Calls for passion, enthusiasm and a campaigning spirit were also made, and this led nicely into a repeat of Eric Britton’s (EcoPlan International) oft heard plea that telework should be treated like gardening without a gardener (or at least only a weekend trimmer) where the grass-roots should be allowed to find their own spot in the sun and display their blooms and disperse their seed unhindered. This, of course, with the not insignificant proviso that public bodies, and especially the Commission, should fertilise (i.e. throw money at) the garden without worrying too much where it lands or the effect it has. Peter Johnston (EC, DGXIII), continuing the green-fingers theme, reminded Eric that the most successful gardening also required design, planning, prioritising, nurturing and cultivating.
Economic and trade issues were the next issue on the agenda and saw some bold claims, for example, that telework creates more jobs than it destroys. Magnus Lemmel (EC, DGIII) pointed to US data which showed that the telecoms sector itself grew by 54,000 jobs last year and this is continuing, and that in New York alone internet created 71,000 new jobs in 1995 (with more expected in 1996) outside the telecoms sector. Moreover, such jobs tend to command higher salaries than older jobs. Magnus repeated the claim that between 7.5 and 10 million jobs in Europe could be teleworkable.
One of the most interesting and closely argued presentations in this debate was made by Horace Mitchell (Global Highways Business Group) representing a new Commission-funded project called “European Telework Development”, under the ACTS Programme. Horace stressed the need to see telework as much more than working at home (as even the earlier definitions had tended to take as a starting point) and explained how it is bound up with, and tends to be the result of, the related concepts of teletrade (i.e. enterprises trading electronically) and telecooperation (i.e. enterprises, individuals and governments cooperating electronically with each other). Telework, in this sense, will affect the majority of Europe’s workers in the future, and the point is not where the work is done (whether at home, with a customer, on the road, in the office) but how it is done and for whom it is done. Horace related this to Europe’s strategic target of creating jobs and work opportunities. This, he emphasised, can only arise out of local prosperity based upon a dynamic local economy which successfully participates in existing markets (the “old work”) but, and even more important, in the emerging markets (the “new work”).
Exploitation of both markets, but particularly the latter, depends upon understanding and responding to Europe’s “information society” as part of, and this is critical, the “global networked economy”. Many of the new markets are enabled by or arise from technology developments (and today this largely means telecoms and IT), coupled with market innovations, and provide work opportunities many of which could be realised anywhere in the world, whether this be India, New York, Ireland or Majorca. This is the real significance of telework, teletrade and telecooperation, and why it is so important for local economies to exploit the global networked economy if they wish to become or remain prosperous. In this sense, local communities have power to direct their own futures if they understand what is happening and take steps to meet the challenge.
The other large set of issues discussed was social and educational. Gerd Kirchhoff (IBM Europe) gave an excellent detailed case study of how a large company has introduced telework practices and the benefits, as well as the issues, arising. Gerd concluded that for the individual employee there were immense benefits to be obtained. No teleworker, once the new arrangements have been experienced, wanted to go back to “normal”, provided certain contractual as well as technical considerations were met. Many of the other presentations in this debate were of the more cautious kind, stressing the dangers of social exclusion, the need to protect workers, raising issues of regulation and even proposals for a “bit tax” to compensate governments for loss of traditional tax revenue in the global networked economy where many electronic transactions are oblivious to national boundaries.
The issue of regulation was one where there appeared to be most disagreement between the two camps. One side pressed the case for little or no interference in order not to damage the still fragile networked economy, and cited telling examples where such damage had been done in the past, and the other made equally heart-felt pleas not to forget the disadvantaged, the exploited and the less capable. The need for social inclusion is paramount in this view, not only ethically and culturally but also because the most successful economies cannot afford to waste potential entreprise or forego consumer demand by cutting off large swathes of citizenry from full economic participation. Perhaps this debate is too extreme and needs to find consensus around a realisation that forward-looking, as opposed to protective, regulation that can support the new markets whilst simultaneously mitigating some of the inevitable pain always experienced during major technological and economic revolutions, is the way forward.
To be fair, everybody agreed that telework could produce better and more rewarding work for the many, as well as contribute to growth and even more jobs. The disagreement lay in how to get from here to there. A healthy, wide ranging debate or further fortification of already entrenched positions, it is hard to say, but your reporter is an optimist that forward steps are being taken.
By Richard Warren
There are many ways to improve the speed of your browser to save time and money. Here are a few suggestions.
Turn Off Images
Images can really slow your browser down, turn off the Autoload Images option to receive just the text of the various pages. If you want to view the graphics on a particular page just turn on the Autoload option and reload the page
With Netscape use the Options Menu, with Internet Explorer use the View, then Options, then Appearance submenus, with Spry Mosaic use the View menu.
Increase Your Cache
The cache is a defined area of memory or disc space that stores the most recent pages as you browse. If you go back to a page during a session your browser should look in the cache first, if the page is still there then your browser will load it straight away from memory rather than trying to download it again from the Web site
With Netscape pull down the Preferences menu, then select the Network submenu , With Internet Explorer you will find cache settings under the View Menu, select Options then Advanced submenus, With Spry Mosaic use the Tools menu then Options and Advanced submenus.
Increase your memory cache to the maximum possible after leaving enough memory to run the browser. Don't be frightened to experiment, if you notice the program slowing down then you know that you have set aside too much cache and can adjust accordingly.
Start Your Browser Before Connecting
A simple step to save you wasting on-line time waiting for your browser to load up and read the preferences etc. while you are paying telephone charges. While you are still "off-line" you can make sure that Autoload Images is turned off, also make the browser screen bigger by turning off the directory buttons and show the toolbar as text not pictures. The larger display area saves some time scrolling as more lines are visible at one time.
Set your own default home-page
Get rid of the browser's default home page that loads everytime you start and replace it with a blank page ( which loads faster) or home-page that is useful to you such as a list of useful sites. (You will need to create your own home-page and save it on your hard disc first ).
With Netscape use the Options menu, select General Preferences and Appearance submenus, With Explorer use the View menu then the Options and Start submenus, With Spry Mosaic use the View menu then the Options and Pages submenus. In each case you will be able to set start-up to load a blank page or your own file.
Download more than one file at a time
With Netscape Navigator it is possible to have more than one window open at a time, you can open a second window and visit a different site whilst the first window is still loading. Try it. You can also download more than one file at a time, so instead of sitting there waiting whilst one solitary file chugs intermittently onto your hard disc set up a number of transfers at the same time.
Modem settings
Make sure that you have set your modem speed as fast as possible. Try experimenting with faster speeds and compression settings.
Make sure that you are using hardware handshaking, software handshaking requires extra effort from your program which takes time. In Win95 you'll find this setting under Modem Properties, in Win3.x you'll find it amongst the Internet Dialer settings
If you need help with these, or have additional suggestions yourself, then pop into the Telework Forum on CompuServe (GO TWEURO) and leave a message addressed to "sysop". If you do not have a CompuServe account then email your request/suggestion to paddy@cis.com
By Kevin Tea
A year or so ago you could count the number of search engines without using your right hand or taking your socks off to use your toes. Today you have the choice of more than a dozen, all of which work in different ways to keep your site in front of the general public. Search engines have become big business. Yahoo, one of the great granddaddies of WWW search engines, started off as a labour of love by two US students; now the site is commercially sponsored and the two students have dropped out of university and have found themselves elevated to the Internet Hall of Fame.
In their simplest forms, search engines are simply electronic directories which users key in a search string and let the software whirr away in the background until a response - positive or negative - is achieved. At first the response can be overwhelming. A simple search for Europe, as an example, will bring up several hundred thousand references. Fortunately, there are ways of creating search strings to fine tune the search using boolean interpretation, but even so you may find yourself having to wade through several hundred responses.
The way that search engines are constructed defines how they respond to queries. Yahoo, for example, has a finely defined directory structure and to gain an entry here you need to have been into the site and seen in which sub- directory you want your entry to go. Alta Vista on the other hands uses robots - or spiders as they are sometimes called to further the web analogy, to go to a site and searches all the pages for key words. While this approach is more thorough, it does provide more references, most of which are usually completely irrelevant.
Another problem is the length of time it takes to get a site registered on search engines. Last year a site registered with Yahoo could be found on the directory after four or five days. Now getting a site registered can take anything up to two months. This situation can only get worse as the growth of the WWW continues and 13 year old Violet in Brugges tries to get her home page dedicated to her pet hamster registered!
To counter the personal home page growth, some engines are adopting a "business only" site policy, while others have a blatant commercial approach and charge for entries.
Some search engines will also scroll search results. For example, if you type in ""Kevin+±Tea"" on Alta Vista now you will find my pages listed on the first results page. Do the same in a few weeks time and it is likely they will have been pushed down the list as the search robot brings up sites registered at a later date. Some companies are offering a service whereby they will re-enter your details day after day in an attempt to keep your company at the top of the list. This overt promotion does not guarantee anything and once the practice starts to clog up the system, the search engine operators will come down on these operators with a very swift, sharp electronic slap on the wrist!
Obviously it takes time if you are going to diligently register with all search engines as you hyperlink from one directory to another. Fortunately there is now a sort of "one-stop" site in Submit-It (http.www.submit-it.com). Here you can register with all the major search engines - Yahoo, Webcrawler, Infoseek, Lycos and Alta Vista et al - as well as some more obscure ones such as BizWiz, ComFind, Apollo and LinkStar. The latter has a very neat facility which enables you to have your own personal section on the search engine which gives the impression that your site has its own special directory. As part of a TAP Support Action, this WWW site is often a "first port-of-call" for other projects and interested parties, trying to get a first impression of the range of TAP and the projects funded within it. We publish regular updates on individual projects, and the latest projects are from the European Library sector - LISTED; and from the Telematics services sector - AGORA:
By Sue Gibbard
Project LISTED, which stands for Library Integrated System for Telematics-based EDucation, is a "Telematics for Libraries" project and forms part of the European Union's 4th Research & Development Framework programme. The co-ordinating partner for the project is Solihull MBC (Education, Libraries & Arts, UK).
Main aim is to increase access to technology-based open learning by making this available in public libraries. Total funding is about 1.1 million ECU, equivalent to over 800,000 and about 50% of this is being provided by the EC from the 'Telematics for Libraries' budget.
Benefits are expected to emerge as the partners apply the outcomes of Europe-wide investigations into the most appropriate technology for library users and the developmental needs of library staff. A major output from the 27 month programme will be a new piece of interactive software, designed to enable individuals to search out and use computer-based training (CBT) materials, to match their own needs.
The Solihull library in Chelmsley Wood will be one of six European Test Sites, the others being in Spain, Portugal, Republic of Ireland and Wales. Representatives from these countries plus the Danish Technological Institute, form the partnership which will be responsible for the project and for disseminating the findings.
The project is broken down into 11 work packages and lead responsibility for these is shared amongst the partners.
Progress so far...
The first quarterly report has been produced for Project LISTED and covers the period from contract start date (10th April 1996), to the end of June 1996.
A highly successful first Project Management Steering Group meeting was held in Solihull on 9/10 April, attended by 19 representatives of all full project partners. The project received both press and local radio publicity in the Solihull area of the West Midlands in the UK following the meeting. Subsequent meetings have included the Irish Consortium on 17 April in Dublin and ILC represented at UCD Focus Group on 25 April.
In the initial stages, completed work packages include desk research to review user needs, an analysis of technological possibilities, and research into staff and client needs for each test site.
Other tasks are to identify technology and develop procedures to move the project forward, and also to identify training needs of library staff based on the desk and staff research findings. A final analysis is under way. Further results are awaited from the user needs analysis in order to complete the specifications of technical user requirements.
An outline plan to develop an interactive software tool has been produced and circulated to the partners for comment.
Although not scheduled to start until October, some very useful preparatory work on the topics of copyright and intellectual property rights are already underway, and a workshop pre-planning meeting was scheduled for mid-July.
Web pages created by the Solihull partner went live on the Web on 10th July and can be found at http://www.itpoint.org.uk/listed.html.
By Sue Gibbard
AGORA is part of the Telematics Application Programme (TAP), whose Consortium includes partners in France, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Finland, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Sweden and the UK. AGORA's main objective is to put into place a telematics-based service providing Small and Medium sized Organisations (SMOs) with One-Stop-Shop support for their development and productivity needs.This One-Stop-Shop will integrate information, consultancy and training services in solutions offered both through direct access and through intermediary organisations, and is aimed at Local, Regional and European levels.
Users involved include craftsmen, farmers, professionals, Chambers of Commerce, local and regional administrations, public and private training organisations, trainers, publishers and television channels, platform integrators and developers and research organisations. It is anticipated that the telematics-based service will be self-sustaining by the end of the project (approximately 36 months).
The AGORA Service, which will be developed, tested and administered by this project is composed of two types of service components:
The AGORA Core Service (ACS), which provides the common facilities which constitutes "the backbone" of the AGORA Services. It is both the main "back-office" environment and the basic service platform for providers and end-user SMOs;
The AGORA Value-added Services (AVAS). The AVAS build upon the features of the ACS, integrating specific functionalities to provide to SMOs direct on-line access to tested information sources and teleservices such as on-line access to training material, telework, legal consultants, etc. The AGORA AVAS are derived from concrete problems which have been identified as primary preoccupations of SMO managers. Each AVAS will be validated by at least 300 users at the verification phase and with at least 3000 at the demonstration phase.
The AGORA Value Added Services will, initially, be focused in this project on the following areas:
Progress so far
Management Reports have been produced on a regular basis (latest May-June 1996) reporting on the progress of the various Work Packages.
Partners have maintained regular contact and several visits to sites have been organised. Currently all tasks within the Project Management Work Package are within schedule.
Promotional materials (Bulletins, Brochures, Video and other presentation materials) have been prepared and are ready to be disseminated to the Regional Support Units, and an international workshop is under preparation to be held in Brussels, possibly in October/November.
A technical report (testing and reporting upon the technical offerings for the AGORA network operations) has been issued. This will enable AGORA partners to suitably equip the Regional Support Units and One-Stop-Shops for access to telematic services.
Starter pack specifications for the AGORA Core Service set-up have been issued to all partners with the design and production planning. Meetings have been held in London (June 12) and Paris (June 28th) to discuss the content and the multilingual aspects. Approximately 15 First Class servers have already been connected. Two-day Regional Support Unit training will be held at 3 different venues which have yet to be finalised.
Several meetings and workshops have recently taken place and these include:
Participation of several of the Partners at the 5th World Wide Web Conference in Paris (May 6/10) and at the Business on the Web Conference (May 9/10) which was organised by DG XXIII;
Visit to SIFOR Oise, an employer's union training organisation which is to become a new Regional Support Unit;
Visit to Union Europeenne des Associations de PME on June 12th - this organisation will participate in the AGORA User Group.
A demonstration of the AGORA client was given to the Union Francaise des Industries de l'Ameublement - their European counterpart are also to become part of the AGORA User Group. Further information about Project AGORA can be found at their Web sight at http://www.agora.org
By Paddy Moindrot
The last Project Management Meeting took place in Porto Carras, Greece, on June 9/10. It was attended by Nikos Bogonikolos, Georgia Panagopolou and Georgia Giovre-Skondra (ZEUS, Greece), Paddy Moindrot (TCW, Wales), Denis Haulin and Ken Kyle (Telergos, France), Rich Fuchs (Fast Forward, Newfoundland), Mark Badham (Octacon, UK), John Hall and Project Manager Bertil Sjoberg (Cobalt, Sweden).
Project Co-ordinator John Hall reminded the group that all Partners should be diligent to charge the correct number of hours and to ensure that reports reflected actual work performed within work packages.
He indicated that all deliverables have now been produced on schedule and under budget. The expectation was that issues associated with start-up and an early change in project management were behind the Project for good.
Deliverables had been presented to the Commission on the Outsourcing Strategy and the Pioneer Groups Report, and work was well under way on the Teleworker Training Report (since delivered) and the Information Audit of client needs and the Business Model configuration.
All schedules were being adhered to, and the six-month forward planning was in line with the technical annex.
There was a discussion of the Brokers Role in TeleMart - many of the Partners will use telecentres to fulfil this role - and John Hall agreed to prepare a discussion paper on the subject. All partners agreed to transmit relevant legal issues and legislation associated with client, broker and supplier relationships to TeleMart from their respective jurisdictions.
Further PMC meetings were scheduled for:
Web sites for TeleMart:
Main site http://goole.octacon.co.uk/proj/telemart
Also view: http://www.cobalt.gotland.com/w-telema.htm and http://www.fastfwd.com/telemart.html