From: asb@cc.gatech.edu (Amy S. Bruckman) Subject: MediaMOO's 5th Anniversary Celebration Date: 13 Jan 1998 17:39:33 -0500 Message-ID: <69gqf5$23l@lennon.cc.gatech.edu> Organization: College of Computing, Georgia Tech [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 @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 @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 @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." *** -- asb@cc.gatech.edu (Amy S. Bruckman)