The Open Meeting system was initially designed and implemented in fall, 1994, to support an on-line meeting, in which several thousand United States government workers conducted virtual discussions of recommended changes in government operations and performance standards. At the system's core is a persistent object database, which coupled to a task engine, supports email and web servers. These present messages and pages, with content generated on-the-fly by the database, in response to users' inputs through queries, remote commands or interactive forms. Inputs can include users' comments which are added to the database and reconfigured as threaded conversations or annotation overlays. The recommendations for discussion had been prepared by the National Performance Review (NPR),[4] a unit in the Office of United States Vice-President Al Gore, with the mission of "reinventing government." It believed a large scale on-line meeting would
for the meeting was guided
by the metaphor of a New England town meeting, where any member can of
the community can
speak to issues of common concern. It envisioned an on-line
environment analogous to a town hall, that would include chat rooms for
an assembly hall, committee rooms and water cooler.
The trajectory toward a community activation system changed with the involvement of the Open Meeting developers, members of an MIT group, whose research concerned intelligent networks that route and enhance messages, based on understanding of their contents and the organizations through which they flow. At the time, the research group was planning a web based system that would manage public participation in government inquiries on proposed changes in regulations. The initial plan called for interested parties to attach their views as annotations to the proposals, differentiated according to the types of comments being made, e.g., question, statement of support. Officials could then retrieve these comments by target and type from a textbase of review documents, using the system, in effect, as an annotation server. Alternatively, the comments on a document could be routed directed to officials whose profiles indicated their in that document. By enabling the public and officials to receive and reply to each other's comments, the system would support virtual discussions composed of threads of typed comments. Through the prism of this plan, the federal workers appeared like individual stakeholders responding to inquiries on proposed changes in regulations affecting their individual interests, work rules and performance standards. They were primarily sources of information about the benefits, feasibility and acceptability of the proposals.
To encourage broad participation and knowledge sharing, regardless of organizational differences, we consequently advised that the meeting focus on eleven NPR reports, each of which concerned reinventing an operating system, like human program development or information management, found in all departments and agencies and subject to the same rules and standards. These could provide common grounds for discussions across organizational boundaries, but recommendations for a specific department were unlikely to draw workers from other departments into a discussion. We also advised dropping the town hall format for several reasons:
The group proposed instead a system similar to the public comment system sketched above, as an application layer for Comlink, an enhanced document distribution system, developed primarily by Mallery and used for the indexing, publication and retrieval of White House electronic releases on the Internet.[5]. The principal features and functionalities of the resulting system included