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The Law Society of Upper Canada is interested in the possibilities of
a computer conferencing system for casual practice-related discussions
among lawyers. This interest was sparked by a demonstration of Law:Forum,
a discussion group using CONFER on an MTS system at Wayne State University.

I am interested in finding out whether something similar to CONFER exists
under UNIX, since we will likely be getting a UNIX machine anyway for
CAI. I have heard about "notes" on the PLATO system, and I assume the
UNIX version is similar.

I would appreciate any comments on the following questions:

1. Is notes appropriate for a discussion group which is all located
   on one machine? No uucp transfers, etc., would be necessary, and
   there would thus be no "Orphaned Responses" or responses grouped
   out of order.

2. Does notes provide the ability which CONFER does, to group responses
   to an article under that article, and to present to the user (upon
   request) only the new responses to each item? This is the major reason
   I wouldn't consider readnews 2.10 for this project.

3. Are there any limitations to notes I should know about?

4. What is notes' user interface like? The users will include lawyers
   who have never gone near a keyboard before.

5. What minimum hardware and/or version of UNIX is required to run notes?

6. Is the source to notes public domain? (We have an educational
   source license anyway.) How would I go about getting a copy?


Thanks for any help on this. If there's interest, I'll summarize
to the net.

Dave Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Osgoode Hall
Toronto, Canada  M5H 2N6
(416) 947 3466
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 {allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!dave