Rationale for Mice NSC
MICE-NSCs will start officially with an Open Meeting at JENC/INET
in Prague, but existing MICE partners of setting MICE-NSCs
in Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden and the UK, and The Netherlands
and Denmark have decided to establish one, too. We envisage that eventually,
all European countries interested in Multimedia Conferencing will set
up one such centre as the first point of call for users of public-domain
mmconferencing software.
The MICE NSCs tries to promote and support the usage of multicasting
public domain mmconferencing software tools.
We're investigating various means of accomplishing
this goal. (For information on MICE-NSCs, look here --at
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice-nsc/index.html.
One specific way we are investigating is to "sit" in between the
developers and the users, to decrease the burden on the developers
and increase support levels for the users.
We're writing FAQs, setting up WWW-servers and mailinglists. We're
in the process of formulating a Call-for-Discussion of a Usenet-group
for the mbone-tools etc.
MICE-NSCs will offer to test public-domain mmconferencing software tools and
release them nationally. MICE-NSCs will write documentation, and translate
existing documentation into national languages where necessary. They will
support users of these software tools released through them. They will maintain databases of users and compile statistics about their use. All
reported problems and, where appropriate, fixes or solutions will be
documented and made available to developers.
Close cooperation with the developers of the tools is, naturally,
required to achieve of this.
We cannot of course impose (nor want to) this "upon" the developers,
but hope for cooperation.
To help catalyze the development and spreading of these tools, and
as a forum exchanging information between developers and MICE-NSCs,
we're planning to set up a mailing list with all the developers on it. This
list would be used for MICE NSC -> developers announcements, as well as
developers <-> developers discussions. (For those that wish to
be on that list, that is.)
This list is supposed to be "unofficial", and not used for anything else
but the above mentioned traffic. So it wont carry a lot of junk
mail. The mailing list has the adress
mice-dev@it.kth.se.