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A Digital Digression Did you ever ride the Tilt-A-Whirl? That’s the ride at the county fair which spins madly about in one direction until just the right shift in balance sends it twirling the other way. The trick to being an expert rider is to sense the fulcrum–that moment when the car is evenly balanced, to know which way to lean to get it spinning the other direction. If you had eyes to see, this GA was about the Neckerchief Revolt, the beginning transfer of authority to a younger generation which isn’t gonna do it the tried-and-true way. Unless you quit looking at people for a moment, and looked around at the mechanics of the meeting..Then you realized: What the 212th GA was really about was computers. Or, more precisely, the 212th GA ought to be identified as the CyberShift GA, when —after hanging at the Fulcrum for several years—the balance finally swung and we made the definitive shift from print to electronic culture. The signs were everywhere, if you had the eyes to see.
And......
Some virtual observations regarding the above: Softbooks: While softbooks are the wave of the future, getting there requires lots of double work by the staffs who now must produce everything in print and electronic format. And a new requisite for committee chairs is the ability to say "in section O, Report number 2 in your notebook, or on page 5 in your softbook" without getting rattled. We plod into cyberspace on step at a time, just like all pioneers in new territory have done. These devices are pretty cool, but technologically not there yet One of the big challenges will be determining the exact moment when it’s more cost-effective to buy softbooks than to produce the forest-full of paper. The heartbreaker is that no matter when they buy softbooks for all commissioners, a new version will come out the next afternoon with a faster chip and double the memory at half the price. Whoever signs the purchase order will be a sitting duck for committing the GA to outdated technology. The Email Banks: Remember Charlotte GA way back in ‘98? If you wanted to check your email without hauling your laptop back to your room you could go to the "cyber-café" where there were computers all hooked up which would let you surf the Internet (at 14k connection speed!) And check your presbynet email. And everything. No one had heard of WebMail–the nifty program which lets you check your email on any computer. In year 2000 you could get it all with a lightning fast connection. In fact, getting it all turned out to be the problem. On the first day of GA I discovered I had neglected to load onto my laptop the driver which would permit me to read my digital camera "film" in my laptop. Off I went to the public computers, downloaded the driver onto a floppy in about 30 seconds, and went happily on my way. The next day I noticed the email bank was down. A young guy who didn’t look old enough to be out of braces was tinkering with the server. He wasn’t wearing a neckerchief in any configuration whatsover. Will you be back up anytime soon? I asked. I have to modify the network program so no one can download anything, he said. Yesterday, somebody downloaded 8 gig of porn and crashed the system. I have to put up a firewall, and it’s conflicting with groupwise. These things are costing a ton of money, and it kills me to have them down. I hope we’ll be back up soon, ma’am. He called me ma’am. I hate that. While the arguments on the floor may remain depressingly the same; the technological underpinnings for the General Assembly are accelerating at rates we’ve got no experience in managing. How do you allow access to GA Online Coverage and email pickup–but prevent porn downloads? Increasing demand: This year there were 24 email computers running, with about 2/3 functioning at any time, and the line was longer than the line for the ladies’ at half-time. Volunteers were going nuts because half the users didn’t have a clue what they were doing, and the other half were trying to bypass the filters. How long before the quality of online access and enough plugs for laptops becomes a chief determiner for upcoming GA Site selection? Is a puzzlement, ma’am. Is a puzzlement.
News Coverage Sym oolt aneus Cap shunning–oops, Simultaneous Captioning Trinz relation eelectron kli: Translation electronically. What an idea. Provide simultaneous captioning for the hearing-impaired, avoiding the need to find human signers. As far as I understand it, human captioners worked with a captioning dictionary to provide the running subtitle. It was intended to be sensitive and accurate. What it looked like was a Doonesbury cartoon.
THAFRG YOU (thank you) Once a word was in the dictionary it would go up on the screen accurately. What was interesting was watching which words made it into the dictionary: Denomination made it quickly. "I move the previous question", even faster. Lez bian and tranz jender never were corrected. They finally published a news brief explaining the captioning process, committing themselves to work for future improvements, and asking for any constructive suggestions. I regarded the captions as a great good gift to proceedings-impaired folk like me.. My suggestion was they ought to publish the transcriptions, which were much better than some of the originals. My seat companions assured me this is not what was meant by "constructive decision." 2001: A GA Odyessey (or hello David, this is Hal) In my first reflection I promised not to mention Monty, our pet python, again. I lied. When Meredith, our daughter, was 18 months old, Graham said that Monty needed a mouse. Meredith toddled to the computer, unhooked the mouse, and dragged it by its "tail" down the stairs to feed Monty. When the generation for whom windows have always been virtual and browsers unrelated to what you do in stores begins to make operating decisions, the way we do GA today will look like those funny flickering movies at the beginning of the last century. I admit it. When I’m in a roomful of Presbyterian professionals, I’m in the little group in the corner spouting, "You know what’s wrong with the church today? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the church today. We haven’t got a Unified Database, that’s what’s wrong with the church today." But as the battle engines crank up for the next round in Louisville, hold tight to the handlebar. The real power uses in Louisville won’t be those who swing the votes, but those who get the network up and keep it that way. To them I say, THAFRG YOU. THAFRG YOU VEE REE MUSH.
This is Erin Cox-Holmes, for KiskiOnline,
www.kiskipby.org,
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| Last Updated: June 26, 2004 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Erin's
GA JOURNAL: 
