August 2000 INFORMS Online Uniting the Far-Flung INFORMS Empire By Michael A. Trick One striking characteristic that differentiates INFORMS from most like-sized societies is the amount of effort put in by volunteers. From subdivisions to committees, task forces to special projects, a vast amount of output from INFORMS is led by volunteers. INFORMS Online itself is primarily a volunteer operation; most of the content is provided by associate editors with invaluable support from paid staff on such issues as server updates and backups. INFORMS Online has a critical role in uniting all INFORMS activities. To many, including almost all "outsiders" to INFORMS, IOL is the primary conduit to INFORMS activities. To find a geographical chapter of INFORMS, it is very natural to first go to INFORMS Online to locate the appropriate subdivision. Journals work the same way. While one might locate Operations Research or another journal through a general search engine, a more direct approach would be to go to IOL and locate the journal on the publications pages. The recent change of IOL's server to a machine in the INFORMS office has greatly expanded opportunities for IOL to act as a uniting force for INFORMS. These changes make it easier for INFORMS to "brand" what it does and take much of the computer-support burden away from volunteer groups, letting them concentrate on their own objectives and goals. The most obvious visible change is the creation of new URLs, the names by which Web pages are known. In the past, much of the content developed by INFORMS groups was not kept on the INFORMS Online server. Instead, it resided on servers owned by individual members, universities and companies. For instance, Patrick Harker, a recent editor of Operations Research, kept an extensive set of pages for the journal on a server owned by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. This was addressed by a Wharton URL that began http://grace.wharton.upenn.edu/. This system was very convenient for Operations Research, as seen from the large number of online appendices, data tables and other information that is only available online. Long term, however, this situation was not stable. Sooner or later, Pat would rotate out of the editorship (sooner in this case, as he was appointed dean of the Wharton School, a tremendous coup for OR/MS, but I am getting off topic) and a new editor would take over, almost certainly using a different computer. Operations Research would then have a new URL, and the old URL would eventually become inoperative. For a site that is archival, this situation is untenable. For a few years, we tried to get around this problem by offering a redirection service. When you entered http://www.informs.org/interfaces, you would automatically be sent to whatever server was hosting Interfaces at the time. Though better than nothing, this solution was still unattractive: the "real" site would be visible to the user, and bookmarks would select the university or company URL, not www.informs.org. Fortunately, with the move of IOL in-house, we are now able to offer real hostnames. Over the next few months, you will see names like or.pubs.informs.org and nymetro.chapters.informs.org. These names will be permanently assigned to INFORMS subdivisions, journals, committees, etc., clearly identifying the activity's association with INFORMS. Concurrent with the new names, INFORMS will be able to offer a new service to its various groups: Web space. Before, issues over who can provide Web space were difficult ones. While most faculty at universities had easy access to Web space, the same could not be said for people in government or industry. Many companies were loath to allow the use of their facilities for "outside" purposes. Furthermore, as the person responsible for the Web presence changed, the issue of finding new Web space became a continual hassle. Now, INFORMS groups can get Web space on the IOL server, easily accessed through FTP, and complete with services such as backup and Web server enhancements. We are already hosting two journals and one subdivision, and we expect to host many more. Eventually, I would expect all of INFORMS' Web activities, referred to by an informs.org address, to occur on an INFORMS server. To promote the goal of letting INFORMS groups concentrate on their activities rather than on routine Web issues, IOL now offers more advanced software support. For instance, IOL recently added a discussion board (http://www.informs.org/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi). Expanding the topic list to include discussions on particular OR/MS or INFORMS subdivisions or other groups is easily done. Already one section is using the board for field-specific discussions. We expect more to sign on as people become better acclimated to the system. INFORMS Online also now has the capability to run informal polls. Recently, we learned that of more than 100 respondents to a poll, 10 percent have attended at least 20 national conferences, while 30 percent have not attended any. This bimodal distribution has strong implications for how IOL must be designed. Subdivisions and other groups are very welcome to find out how these polls can be used to answer their own questions. INFORMS volunteers, through subdivisions, committees, task forces and other activities, are tremendous assets to INFORMS and make the society unique and strong. By providing software and a central site, IOL helps to unify these disparate activities into a coherent whole. Michael Trick (trick@cmu.edu) is a professor at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University and the editor of INFORMS Online. Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 2000 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 1999, 2000 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.