Alton-Scheidl, 'Redesigning the Concept of Bulletin Board Systems: Towards the Needs of an Emerging Mass Media', Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture v1n04 (June 30, 1993) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/aejvc/aejvc-v1n04-alton-scheidl-redesigning The Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture __________________________________________________________________ ISSN 1068-5723 June 30, 1993 Volume 1 Issue 4 SCHEIDL V1N4 Redesigning the Concept of Bulletin Board Systems: Towards the Needs of an Emerging Mass Media Roland Alton-Scheidl Austrian Academy of Sciences Research Unit for Socio-Economics Kegelgasse 27 A-1030 Vienna scheidl@lezvax.oeaw.ac.at ABSTRACT One can not deny, that open group communication tools are important and heavily used modules of various on-line services. This article gives an overview on its diffusion and structurizes application fields. As a result, the commonly used topic-tree with serial contributions does not fulfil the various demands of exchanging opinions, announcing events or offering commodities. A data model with higher structurized items and a set of feedback channels is discussed as a suggestion for design improvements. The social and economic dimension of Bulletin Board Systems ----------------------------------------------------------- A discussion on the impact of information technologies on the democratisation of society must include proposals to construct an adequate media, that fits the needs of a post industrial economy and of public interest groups for individual decision making in a global culture. A comprehensive telematic infrastructure must allow not only the representation of market structures but also the formation of opinions like in real person-to-person groups. On the one hand, experiences with tools for computer supported co-operative work (CSCW) for intra-organisational applications may now be exported to the arena of open, low level organised or diffuse user groups. On the other hand, the 20 years lasting trials with bulletin board services are seen as an experimental area, on which experiences can be obtained for a future mass medium with a broad diffusion through all social and economic fields. The paper is based on a technology assessment research project on value added services, sponsored by the Austrian PTT and the Austrian Ministry of Sciences. Various nation- wide and international services have been tested and compared to each other: service offer, user numbers, accounting schemes, user friendliness, topic areas, or marketing strategies. This paper focuses on electronic messaging services and discusses the data concept of asynchronous group communication. An overview on other diffusion factors of electronic messaging services and a comparison of user interfaces is given in ALTON-SCHEIDL 1993. This paper is aimed to persons that work either in standardisation committees for group communication or implement BBS software, but may give to anybody who uses bulletin boards an idea of today's limitations and possible future improvements. Exponentially growing user numbers show, that bulletin board systems (BBS) are used extensively as a communication tool in the commercial, academic and private sector to share interests, to ask questions, to co-ordinate activities, to exchange commodities or just to be entertained. Other terms for bulletin board are conference, echo, hotline, news group or forum. Asynchronous group communication tools are not only usable for handling serious problems. They are also valuable in resolving the large number of small, local problems which occur every day. The total value of the sum of the resolution of all these small problems is as important as the value for resolving serious and critical problems. Asynchronous group communication has been found to be very valuable to co-ordinate activity which is done in parallel by people at different places in an organisation. None of the traditional communication tools is very suitable for this. Asynchronous group communication allows activities to proceed in parallel with people doing many other tasks at the same time and without any travel costs or time. Prestructured topic areas make it easy to find and file contributions. Other solutions, that are based on subscribing and broadcasting contributions, tend to inundate one's Email system.1 One important value of asynchronous group communication is that the use of such systems creates a valuable store of knowledge. Good asynchronous group communication tools therefore include facilities for archiving and retrieving the results of the communication processes. While ordinary information retrieval tools search in data bases of knowledge stored in computers, asynchronous group communication instead searches in the "brains of groups" of connected people. The market volume for value added services is estimated to 5 billion ECU for the European market2 in 1992, where the relative part of Electronic Messaging increases from 17 percent (1989) to 29 percent (1992), i.e. an annual growth rate of 60 percent. The following table gives an overview of existing on-line services, in which BBS-like services play an important role. Fig. 1: Users at Public Electronic Messaging Services (1991) USA Europe CompuServe 840.000 < 5.000 Prodigy 1.000.000 - GEnie 250.000 < 2.000 Internet 1.000.000 100.000 EuroKOM - 2.200 fido 500.000 50.000 Zerberus - 3.000 First Class (1992) 30.000 3.000 X.400 n.a. n.a. Fig. 1 shows, that market leaders in the USA are on the way to serve the European market. The list does not cover users of other telecommunication sectors like database services, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) or telemetry, whether in some cases the same networks are used.3 A broad acceptance of usage can be observed not only in the academic field and in computer related economical sectors, but also for non governmental organisations (NGOs) and private users. Most services can be used directly via the telephone network or via access points that route to a packet switching network. The old concept of bulletin boards ---------------------------------- Commonly two ways of human-to-human interaction are available on computer networks and mailboxes: point-to-point (e-mail) and multipoint-to-multipoint (BBS). The latter allows users to communicate in a manner, that they look up in topic areas and read messages, ask questions or commenting other's contributions without previously knowing other partners. One could describe it as a network of specialists covering dozens to hundreds of topics. The most commonly used BBS structure is a two dimensional topic tree. Each leave contains a list of senders and subject titles in a reverse chronological order. The contributions are kept for a certain period of time and may be sometimes retrieved in an archive. Browsing of subject keywords may be available. (See Fig. 2) A moderator may be responsible for the contents of a board. But social regulation can be also obtained by a "netiquette", a set of rules of behaviour. In case of misuse, participants of a group claim on the board or by direct mail. On special boards, suggestions can be made to rise a new group, which is then set up by the service provider. A group may also contain more "replies" to a former contribution than original statements. Messages like "frequently asked questions" must be posted periodically. No tools for voting or evaluating are available. Fig. 2: Common BBS Contribution Structure BBS: area[] [] = list of contrib= area: short_name_of_area contribution contrib[] contrib: sender subject date_of_origin text_or_file Some projects try to ameliorate the poor structure of groups and contributions. For example, recently available tools on Internet (Gopher, Archie, World Wide Web) improve data retrieving, but don't solve the problems due to low structured information items. The most important task of the service provider, the system operator or a moderator of a group is to maintain the contents of the contribution boards. To keep the database clean from information garbage and to delete matured messages makes an operator with enhanced privileges to a mighty guard of information. The following proposals will give this force back to the users trying to eliminate the dominance of information judges. Another concept for Asynchronous Group Communication ---------------------------------------------------- Here I want to outline some technical suggestions to improve this very common way of telematic group communication by adopting a consensus-oriented communication model with differentiated feedback loops. The structure of the BBS data model discussed below is represented in Fig. 3. This approach does not ask: Is this technically easy to implement. It takes into account, what kind of social demand we have and how we can construct a tool that fulfils this demand.4 Here we have to consider, which elements of the discourse structure of real face-to-face groups can be transformed to virtual group communication. The co-ordination of actions in real groups within organisations depends on four factors: power, influence, confidence and communication. Power is mediated through direct commands, by delegated commands or by prestructuring conditions. Influence is a little bit more informal and relies on reputation and persuasive-ness. Confidence is a kind of social exchange deal, as partners expect something from each other. It is necessary to bring pre-performance into a group, knowing it is worth the effort. So, to blueprint the factors of successful co-ordination between subjects to the electronic sphere, further levels of interaction beyond exchanging plain text on boards should be available. Systemic as well as non-verbal channels have to be at hand to commit partners to actions. A text exchange board fulfils different tasks, that affects the structure of communication. For example, a board for technical or political discussions needs another reply structure than a board for offering jobs or demo-software. The one is a situation of virtual group communication, where conversations can emerge from a contribution. The other is a market image, that needs an extended context field for explanation and a more simple feedback structure for negotiating.5 A third kind of contributions are announcements of events, which need a "valid until" field to prevent information overload due to out-of-time data. Generally, a non hierarchical topic tree may allow forming sets of groups according to the user's interests. A mechanism to enter a topic area directly (using a go- command) should prevent step-by-step climbing in the jungle of forums. Different filters should allow to select groups not only by topics, but also by geographic areas, by the age (actuality) of contributions, by the frequency of usage or by a user defined selection of keywords that describe a set of interests. Furthermore, sophisticated tools could support the user by learning his or her special interests and support him or her in filing contributions on a local device. An exact description of what an arena is about should make also the objectives clear to novices of a forum. Context information may be given if a group derives from another, more general area, or to support the users with definitions or frequently asked questions. PALME and THOLERUS (1992) suggest to introduce conversation branches that may fork from a contribution. Forked conversations may be moved to the first level of contributions within an area and may even be forwarded like a single contribution (with all the history). Hereby, users can read contributions in a structured way. By related contributions they mean contributions sent to the same group, and, within a group, contributions belonging to the same conversation. A conversation can be defined as a number of contributions related to each other by direct or indirect reply links. In fact, each contribution may be the starting point of a conversation with a tree of replies. Users also should have facilities to skip part of discussions or a certain time period within an area. Here, a one-line-comment on the reason of a reply is suggested, which may contain a spontaneous expression, comparable to the replicant's voice and gesture. To this short comment, another contribution may be added as a full reply. Instead of a new contribution, it should be also possible, to add a pointer that indicate to an existing contribution to prevent participants in a discussion getting lost in details. Usually, each group may be unmoderated, or may have one or more moderators who control the contributions allowed, either through pre-moderation, where the moderator approves contributions before they are distributed, or post- moderation, where the moderator can remove unacceptable contributions. Moderators can also start new groups or and they control membership for closed groups. A user driven moderation, that allows the readers to give points for contributions, is suggested here as a third operating class: Polling mechanisms may allow decision making, for example on rising a new discussion group. The user should have the possibility to give an answer on one or more different levels. A consensus-oriented archetype of real group interaction is being modelled to a contribution entity structure. It takes into account, that human interaction is not only based on exchanging "plain text", but also consists of gestures, comments, frowning or just being present or giving a signal by leaving the discussion room. I suggest to implement four levels of "immediate" feedback: a) To count the number of readers of a contribution, so that everybody gets an image of the size of the audience; a) The average fairness field gives an idea of the quality and publicity of a contribution; b) The average agreement field polls the opinion of the readers to a subject, as they may give a note to each contribution; c) A field to suggest either making the running conversation to a group or include a group into another group. d) A field that counts for calls to delete a contribution may trigger a garbage collecting task, if a certain percentage of readers wants it to erase. This may affect a wandered contribution or a message that punches the netiquette, which is a set of social rules that is outlined for nearly any network. To give an assessment to a contribution is voluntary to any reader, each reader may vote once on each of the four levels. To give a vote should be as easy as to hit a hot key followed by a number. The relation of numbers of readers to the summarised publicity of all contributions in a group could be calculated to a "hot-topics-indicator", as more people will vote on areas they are concerned to. This would extinguish the well known function of other broadcasting media. Media analysts call it agenda setting, the daily ranking of the main topics by journalists and editorial boards, which forms to a large extend the public opinion and gives the idea, what is an important political question and what can be sustained. In this proposal, a user may follow contributions in an order, that is sorted by different keys by readers of messages. Fig. 3: Suggested data structure for asynchronous group communication (AGC) AGC: discuss_area[] [] = list of event_area[] market_area[] selector_1: region selector_2: last_update selector_3: frequency selector_4: keywords discuss_area: short_name_of_area long_name_of_area what_is_this_area_about explanation_of_context: contrib[] discussion_on_topic: contrib[] poll_results discuss_area[] event_area: short_name_of_area long_name_of_area contrib[] selector_1+: region event_area[] market_area: short_name_of_area long_name_of_area market_contrib[] market_area[] contrib: sender subject abstract text date_of_origin keep_contrib_until is_reply_to_another_contrib number_of_readers average_fairness average_agreement make_new_area calls_for_delete reply[] market_contrib: sender item_description offer_or_demand date_of_origin keep_contrib_until price_or_range text attached_file calls_for_delete market_response[] reply: sender one_line_comment contrib market_response: sender text Summary ------- An integrated technology assessment approach with various suggestions to enhance the data structure of bulletin board systems has been described. Two goals are essential: First to minimize the duties of the service provider by giving as many tasks as possible to the users. They will be capable to maintain the media as a self managed communication arena. This can be achieved by introducing feedback fields for contributions. Secondly, the model tries to separate consensus oriented communication and market situations. This shall not only allow decision making as suggested in grass- roots democracy approaches, but will also offer an announcement area and an area for offer and demand with room for negotiating. Annotations ----------- 1 Benefits and limitations of computer conferencing for online education are described in Berge/Collins 1993. 2 Source: SciCon 3 For a description of telecommunication networks see Alton-Scheidl/Sint 1993, for an overview on the international market of these sectors see Latzer 1993 and for the Austrian market Alton-Scheidl/Latzer/Sint 1993. 4 See SCHEIDL 1990b for a theoretical base of a communication theory for electronic messaging. 5 Jurgen Habermas has outlined two different forms of social acting. The first is a consensus oriented way of negotiating, the second is the way of bargaining to each partners best advantage. Traditional media, as they are constructed with might and money, tend to support the egocentric way of communication acts. On the other hand, the discourse structure, as intended with discussion forums in bulletin board systems, allow an active participation in opinion forming processes. Literature ---------- Alton-Scheidl, Roland 1993: Challenges for Europe's Information Services: Diffusion Factors for Telecommunication Based Messaging Services with Special Consideration of User Interface Design. Draft Paper. Alton-Scheidl, R. / Sint P. 1993: Telekommunikationsnetze. In: Bauer / Latzer 1993, 37 ff. Bauer, J / Latzer, M. (eds) 1993: Nutzliche Verbindungen - Osterreichs Telekommunikations-dienste im internationalen Kontext. OCG -Reihe 66. Oldenbourg: Wien. Berge, Zane L. / Collins, Mauri 1993: Computer Conferencing and Online Education. Electronic Journal on virtual Culture Vol 1 Nr 3; ftp from byrd.mu.wvnet.edu in pub/ejvc: BERGE.V1N3. Habermas, Jurgen 1981: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hedtke, John v. 1990: Using Computer Bulletin Boards. MIS- Press. Palme, Jacob; Tholerus, Torgny 1992: SuperKOM - Design considerations for a distributed, highly structured computer conferencing system. In: Computer Communications, vol. 15, no.8 October 1992, pp 509-518. Scheidl, Roland 1990a: Kommunikation in der telematischen Gesellschaft. Wien. Scheidl, Roland 1990b: Elektronisch vermittelter Diskurs. Die Konsenstheorie als Gestaltungsprinzip fur die Telematik. In: Informatik Forum 4/90, Wien. Copyright annotations --------------------- CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, FirstClass are trademarks of the corresponding companies. This paper may be distributed on electronic media, containing the author's name, email adress and the year of publishing, i.e.1993. 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