@@32===================================================================
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 14:35:37 -0300 (ADT)
From: "Percy E. van Kanten" <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]

[email protected],[email protected],[email protected],[email protected]

<Hi_Mic@urc>,<Hilleris@urc>,<Ine_Tsai@uvs>,<JDavid@urc> , <MHW@urc>,<Mike@urc>,<Pascal@urc>,<Ray@urc>

Dear friends,

First of all, Daniel, could you again relay this message to the rest of the group, as it becomes quite expensive for me to enter into international multi-adressee discussions. You might want to consider including also the mail adresses of the Caribbean CUNET users listed below. And please add to your list, my friend Andy Lo A Foe <[email protected]> former sysop of our EXP-site, who now studies in Holland but indicated to me to be very interested in the topic. (You might send him your compiled files. He doesn't pay by the byte anymore)

Then, I re-read the mails I have received in the last couple of days.

>From what I understand indeed a rather heated discussion has been held on
the net on the topic of Caribbean connection. I may be misled by the possible incompleteness of information. And I may bring you to the edge of totally wrong conclusions. But please bear with me and do correct the errors in my line of thinking, I might be stumbling on.

I looked at the array of participants in the discussion. Good people. I know some of them. Nine of them having their address (at least their mail-address) in the USA. (And I dragged number 10, my friend George Sadowsky into it). One in Canada. One in the UK. And only 4 from the Caribbean. Three from the Dominican Republic (including my friend Daniel, who by habit is in ANY discussion about ANY topic :-)) and one from Jamaica.

Let me correct myself. Archie is also writing to us from Jamaica, as far as I know. He is the Caribbean coordinator of the CUNET, overseeing the whole range of active CUNET nodes. Including at least two in Jamaica, one of which has full IP. And of course he will have a good reason to use his University of Maryland account to communicate on the net.

Of course we should be happy with the the concern about our conncetivity in the Caribbean. And the external debaters should not leave off. We need their interest and their help. But maybe we from the Caribbean should get ourselves involved more in the discussion.

Archie provided me with an interesting mail containing adresses of CUNET coordinators and other active mailers in the CUNET. They had been approached to provide statistics on their nodes.

Four of these had sent their information by e-mail.

Another four of these network coordinators had been called by VOICE PHONE by Mr Santiago from Washington to be asked for statistics. Two others did provide information but I could not determine through what media. And four of the CUNET mail sites reachable through the net (including Suriname) did not provide data for whatever reason.

In Archie's mail I counted 11 mail adresses of people in the Caribbean who apparently were willing to provide information, and might well be interested in the topic of their connectivity. Yet I have no indication that they are part of the heated discussion. I might suggest that it could be a good idea to discuss the topic WITH and AMONG the Caribean not only ABOUT us. At least I would suggest (and maybe it has been done, but I have no indication of it from the few mails I have received) to give them some feedback info.

There may be more people on the net, (like me) who are not coordinators but may have interest in the topic and the ability to contribute.

Furthermore, looking at the statistics provided, I have no reason to doubt their correctness. And for a start, they do give a very good picture. But I would be interested in the methodology used.

What criteria have been used to determine "active" or "very active" ? What time frame are we talking about? Our experience here was that when the net was new, everyone was very active. But then it started to wear off. There was a time that we had only 10 to 15% reasonably active users. We now have some growth of activity and a clean-up of the list.

Daniel has suggested to use the last 2 days of logging in to determin "very active". I disagree with him.
Looking at myself, I usually log in several times a day. But there are those days that you simply do not find time to connect. Two days in a row, can happen. Also some people do not have PC-s at home and can only log into the system if they are at a place where they have access to one. Like at their office, Or at the university computer center. Or at a friends house. The real addicts would be screaming within a week, and run to their computer. But maybe not in two days. And maybe not in weekends. Or on the contrary, only in weekends. Or on Wednesdays when they happen to have lectures. Or whatever. So take a week to cut off the very active ones.

And take a month or maybe two to consider the accounts still in use. And after three months of inactivity, inclusion in user-statistics would even be misleading.

Incidently (at Daniels special request) On the day I drew the statistics, and the day before, 50 users had logged into our main node, and only 3 into the TOC-node (which tends to show much less actvity)

I would suggest to again approach the providers of information. This time with two clear questions. One, to proivide statistics according to a predetermined method. And two, to invite them to participate in the discussion and give their input.

Of course some clever way of distributing this info should be deviced. And not all of them may have access to WWW. But heck, we used to reach each other with LISTSERV, in the olden days! Perhaps some dusty old copy of it is lying around somewhere. (Incidently: does someone know of a freeware (or free anyway) LISTSERV-like mailserver to be installed on our LINUX box?)

The next question of course would be, what to do with those statistics. Because it is nice for some cybernauts from the USA and Canada to know that we don't connect enough. But could we for instance start working out a good way of doing something about it? Exchange experience? Look at technical gimmicks? Send copies of User Instruction files? Tell each other how we managed to cheat the Telephone companies into a cooperation agreement; what sad story we made up to trick the NSF or the OAS or anyone else into funding our lines :-). Or what good things we have reached by putting one and one togehther over the net, making three or more?

That looks much more promising than fighting over statistics!

And in that discussion I am very much interested to participate. I think that the net-activity in our region could very well be improved. Lets join hands to do something about it. Any input would be welcome, I think.

Cheers!
Percy

DEBATERS:
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected]

[email protected]
[email protected],

[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],

PROVIDERS OF STATISTICS

By E-Mail
Albert H. Daniels, [email protected], St Lucia

[email protected]

By Telephone
Robert Williams, ([email protected]), Barbados Donnie de Freitas, ([email protected]), St Vincent George Daniel, ([email protected]), Antigua Flavio Moncion, ([email protected]), Rep Dom

Unknown Media
Brian Candler,([email protected]), Belize Barbara Ambrister, ([email protected]), Bahamas

No statistics

(*)Niherst
(*)IMA
(*)CARIRI
Suriname [But some idiot wrote a stupid article in OnTheInternet :-)] .