World Wide Conferencing network at HIP '97

World Wide Conferencing Network at HIP '97

HIP '97 will feature the official start of WWCN

Truly world wide chat, and beyond?
At the HIP '97 the World Wide Conferencing Network will officially become online. WWCN is a text-based chat network, much like IRC (Internet Relay Chat). In the past three years, a replacement protocol has been developed, especially targetted at being deployed at a very high scale. Its design has been inspired by Dan Simmons' conception of the Datasphere where human beings can connect to, either using traditional means (keyboard and such) or a highly efficient spinal tap. After that, they can communicate with every other soul in the Datasphere. The Datasphere spans across countries, across planets, across galaxies.
At HIP '97
At the hackers' festival HIP '97, three presentations will be given, probably one on each of the three days that HIP lasts. These will be:

Introduction	Ins and outs of the protocol
A presentation is given of the problems WWCP is trying to solve. Also, the general design philosophy is given. There will be plenty time for questions, discussions and who knows what.	The World Wide Conferencing Protocol makes use of a proprietary multicasting service on top of TCP/IP. This may look as a rather peculiar (say: weird) choice. In this presentation, a rationale for this decision is given, as well as an overview of the way the multicasting protocol works. Also, attention is paid to two distributed auxiliary services: the Channel Directory Service and the User Directory Service. Due to these distributed services, the protocol is truly capable of scaling up to millions of users and tens of thousands of servers without using excess bandwidth or server memory.
Sociological Aspects
The World Wide Conferencing Network and its associated protocol also try to solve social plagues that torture current IRC based networks, like channel wars, bot wars, clone flooding, harassment, nick collisions and related anomalies, etcetera. However, only time will tell how such a large crowd of people will react on eachother and the environment in which they communicate.
Be there
If you want to experience the beginning of a new era in online, text-based chatting, you should be at the HIP august 8, 9 and 10 in The Netherlands! Or, if you can't wait or if you won't be at the HIP, have a look around around on the homepage of the World Wide Conferencing Network.

(c) 1997 by G. Hiddink
If you have any comments, please mail to grit@wwcn.student.utwente.nl