A Fanciful WebNet Scenario

K had a small grant to add 3 Macs to the L3D LAN. She had managed a LAN for her old department when she was a grad student and figured that adding a couple computers to the existing L3D network should be pretty easy. First, she wanted to know how things were already set up.

1. REVIEWING CURRENT PRACTICES.

K started up WebNet. First she selected the L3D LAN from WebNet’s catalog of LAN designs to display a simulation of the network as of its latest design changes. Then just to make sure, she ran WebNet’s Trawl utility to go out on the LAN and check that the simulation corresponded to what was currently active on the physical network. Everything looked reasonable.

Just to get things started, K added a couple of Macs to the simulation layout by dragging the Mac icon from her local gallery into a new room in the drawing. The simulation immediately added something it called a “routing gateway” as a suggestion of what was probably needed to tie the extra computers into the existing network. K was confused. She had never heard of a routing gateway. She opened the larger Web-based gallery of network equipment and tried to look this up there, with no luck.

K knew she should turn to the information resources available through WebNet and, for instance, find the write-up of the appropriate Methods and Procedures for adding a subnet. But first she tried to find out why the existing LAN was set up the way it was and what that suggested routing gateway was supposed to do.

Figure 1. A mock-up of WebNet viewed in a Web browser. K is working in a simulation of her LAN (bottom). She has access to multiple sources of community memory and domain knowledge (upper left), much of it indexed by the state of her work. Additional information, such as various items for the simulation (upper right) can also be accessed through the Web, modified during usage, and then shared with the community by being stored back on the Web.

2. SEARCHING ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORIES.

K highlighted the routing gateway icon and then selected “About Current Selection” from the resources. This brought up a definition of routing gateway from the Black Box vendor site on the Web, as well as the definition in a glossary created by the networking community at the university. The Black Box definition was perfunctory, but pointed to detailed specs and glossy pictures of that vendor’s product line. The other glossary gave a rather uninformative basic definition, but it was annotated by a number of people who had actually used routing gateways and were anxious to share their hard-won knowledge about its idiosyncrasies.

Other pointers displayed as part of the “About Current Selection” resources sent K to threads of email discussions about both router gateways and relevant history of the L3D LAN. This is where K began to understand the importance of considering such a box. Then she went to the “Methods and Procedures” and explored their design rationale hypertext. Everything started to make clear sense within the context of what K wanted to do in the L3D LAN, given its history. K decided that she would use a routing gateway she had seen on the Black Box Web page. It was not included on the WebNet Repository of equipment icons for simulations, but was similar to a Cisco product that was in the repository. K dragged the Cisco product to her local gallery; dragged the picture of the Black Box product from its Web page; created a new gallery item with the Black Box picture and the Cisco simulation behavior; modified her new item to have the right specs; and added it to her simulation. She also dragged her new representation to the Web repository so other people could find it and use it easily. K grinned; now she was contributing to the world-wide community that uses and expands WebNet.

3. LEARNING THROUGH TARGETED BROWSING.

K could now quickly add printers, scanners, etc. When she was finished, she asked WebNet to critique her design. WebNet had no complaints, but suggested that the new computers be included in the LAN backup procedures. WebNet pointed to further information, which turned out to include an informative tutorial on the backup procedures. The tutorial consisted of an automated path through some hypertext information.

4. BEYOND PAPER MEDIA.

Thinking back to when she used to manage her departmental LAN, K was impressed with how far WebNet had come from management by paper memos, back of envelop sketches, random jottings of designers and out-of-date catalogs from vendors:

There is an active simulation of the design. [Computational support]
Proactivity or critics serve as entry points to relevant on-line information. [Reflection-in-action]
In stark contrast to what information was available in the past, the Web-based info tends to be up-to-date because it is easier for people to add and edit it as they use it. [Seeding-Evolution-Reseeding]
A lot of info—like key historical email exchanges—is collected automatically. [Effort/Benefit]
The simulation is integrated with proactivity/critics, design rationale, catalogs of designs, extensible galleries of agents, etc. [MFA of a DODE]