Feb 17 - Feb 19, 1998

About Jim's question, I'm not sure if it's a revolution or not. But, I can see two different organizational items for companies and a behavioural more general one :

a) organization matters
- all the industrial process may have to be organized around an electronic functioning. The best example is DELL's;
- the second remark is about hierarchy! What a change when the 'scale' principle doesn't exist anymore, because the information 'short-circuit' eliminates it! What a challenge when a young newcomer may build in some months an 'expertise network' which took others 10 years or more to establish!

b) The other problem which seems important to me is visible in the education field. For years (hundreds of years) we've been taught in a sequential way, from A to Z. Or, with the Internet and the hypetext (and TV : channel surfing), this seems to be totally out of focus. When you look nowadays at a younsgter's learning process, you immediately see that it is non continuous : he's jumping, surfing from one idea to another. Is our educational system and its content (i.e. the teachers!) ready for this kind of teaching (the answer is probably NO) and how to adapt : these are my questions!

Following is a summary of points discussed in the parallel Japanese Online Conference.

9th February to 11th February
The role of the public sector should not be limited to ISPs, but energy should also be devoted to the construction and training needed to provide the basic environment for hardware connections to the Net.

Also, given the differences in the cultural levels of each country, there are problems inherent in the attempt to spread the Internet evenly throughout the globe.