🚀 go-pugleaf

The difference between a conference and a magazine is that in a conference,
control is presumed to be democratic. Anyone (everyone) is welcome to speak.
A magazine has a different power structure: There is the magazine staff 
of writers and editors who  minister to the subscribers. This is a less
equitable arrangement, but is good for delivering information from those
who know to those who don't.  A Conference is better for tasks like brain-
storming which benefit from a more equal participation.

As a veteran Conferencing Systems user and a new conferencing system
developer, I am acutely aware of the problem of information and decision
overload.  The management of the number of branching and pruning decisions
will require improved systems for handling these systems automatically.
The drudgery of this task given the tools currently available in most
conferencing systems today is one of the things that is keeping conferencing
from taking the commercial data processing world by storm.  It is hoped that
some breakthroughs will be achieved in this area in the not too distant
future, but it we probably won't see major changes in this community for a
while.
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