eWORK 2000 - European Telework Week

New Ways to Work 2000European TeleworkIST - New Methods of WorkWith the inauguration of the 5 th Framework Programme, the ETO site is being used as an example of telecooperationto help project teams form to bid for projects in the action line 'New Methods of Work'. This section of the site isdesigned to stimulate bridging activities between the th 4 and 5 th Framework Programme in the relevant topic areas. Aswell as basic information and pointers to the relevant EU pages, there are links to projects of the th 4Programme thatare clustered according to the themes of the 5 th . There are also opportunities to enter discussion forums and makecontact with potential participants and project partners. The IST pages at the ETO site are at:http://www.eto.org.uk/ist-nmw/index.htmWeb Based Discussion ForumSince its inception, ETO has run forums through email discussion lists. At the time (1996), it was felt that onlineforums, such as those enjoyed by users of CompuServe or employees on corporate networks with access to groupwaresuch as Lotus Notes, were not universally available or affordable to Internet users or easy to use. During the last yearor so, there have been several new or enhanced products that made it possible to offer such a service. Thus, O'Reilly'sWebBoard was implemented at the ETO site as a user-friendly alternative to an email list.The general telework forum has thus been implemented as the Telework WebBoard. It provides an interface thatshows threaded message, so that users can see the structure of the discussion. Just as in modern file managers onoperating systems, users can expand or contract portions of the forum tree. The figure below shows the overall lookand structure of the general discussion forum. The WebBoard has proved popular, there being over 1,000 registeredusers. One disadvantage is that activities (at the moment) need to be carried out online. Therefore, in those locationswhere telecommunications or Internet costs make this too expensive, the email list is still available. Its archives canalso be accessed directly on the web. The Telework WebBoard can be found at: http://webboard.eto.org.ukSite StatisticsDuring May 1999 the European Telework Online web site received 192,294 hits at an average of 6,203 hits a day,from users in at least 86 countries, who downloaded more than a Gigabyte (1,000 Megabytes) of information. The topten requested pages (other than the home page) are shown in the table below. Seven of the top 10 are the same as lastyear. The new entries are the Telework 98 Status Report, the statistics, and the search engine, indicating howinvaluable such a tool is on a site with so many resources.AcknowledgementsA site of the magnitude of ETO would not be as successful as it is without the help of many people. Although ETDgets support from the European Commission, most of the web content, particularly that of the heavily visited nationalpages depends extensively on unpaid volunteers. The core site development team acknowledges their extensivecontribution to the success of this site. Particular recognition over the past period is due to the technical help from theETO Internet Service Provider Loud-n-Clear.com and to the database team that did the initial entries to the resourcesdatabase - Roumen Nikolov, Evgeni Galabov and their colleagues at Virtech Ltd. of Sofia, Bulgaria. We are pleased toacknowledge their contribution and those of the many other contributors to the world’s premier teleworking site.- 193 -