New Friends and Partners Internet site (fwd)

[Devin P Browne]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 96 16:03:43 EST
From: Center for Civil Society International <ccsi+ at u.washington.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <civilsoc at solar.rtd.utk.edu>
Subject: New Friends and Partners Internet site

>From: Greg Cole <gcole at solar.rtd.utk.edu>

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce the new version of the jointly developed
U.S.-Russian "Friends and Partners" Internet service.   The new F&P server,
many months in the making, hopefully provides a better organization of
information - and a better structure on which to place new services.   It
is available at two sites.  The U.S. location is at:

        http://www.friends-partners.org/friends/home.html
             or
        http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/friends/home.html

and the Russian site is at:

        http://alice.ibpm.serpukhov.su/friends/home.html

If you do not have WWW access, please feel free to use our public telnet
client.  Simply telnet to solar.rtd.utk.edu and login as "friends".

We long ago established this electronic mailing list (listserver) to help
facilitate communication for this project. If you are not already a
subscriber, you can easily join by sending a message to
listproc at solar.rtd.utk.edu with the following text:

SUBSCRIBE FRIENDS Your name

This is a moderated list with twice-weekly 'digests' of all postings sent
to subscribers.


As many on this list already know, the new server replaces the original
Friends and Partners which was announced on the Internet on January 19,
1994, and is retired today, having offered 25 months continuous service --
handling over 6,000,000 requests for information from its WWW and WAIS
servers and transmitting many thousands of email messages.

In addition to an entirely new interface and organization of the
information on the server, the new Friends and Partners represents a
different way of presenting information on the WWW.  The server
automatically detects the browser and platform of the user and adjusts the
output and format of information accordingly.  The server offers material
in both English and Russian (although we are still in process of
translating many files) and handles most popular Russian Cyrillic
encodings.

The server now has several new interactive components -- including a new
Friends conferencing system (called the "Coffee House") and a "Web Chat"
interactive chat server (thanks to Sasha Ovchinnikov).  There are also a
number of new databases on this system including a U.S./NIS funding
opportunities system, the International Science Foundation's Long Term
Research Grants database, the new "Academic Clearinghouse" database, a 5+
year searchable archive of the Open Media Research Institute daily news
updates, the new NIS Internet catalog, the Friends and Partners search
facility, a new "subscribers" database, the US-Russia-International
cookbook and many other resources.

Our new Web Chat server is available at the following URL:

        http://www.friends-partners.org/friends/chat/chat.html

We will be on-line here all day on Monday, February 19 to field your
questions, comments, and suggestions.  At the same time, we will maintain
an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) session, using channel #friends on server
solar.rtd.utk.edu (port 6667).  If you do not have IRC client software, you
are most welcome to use our public IRC client by telnetting to
solar.rtd.utk.edu and entering "fp-irc" at the login: prompt.  This will
automatically place you on the #friends channel.

We hope you will be able to participate in at least one of these sessions.

More than anything else, Friends and Partners represents a cooperative,
community-based effort to share information and facilitate work together.
We wish to offer our heartfelt gratitude to the many friends who continue
to work with us on the development of F&P.  We would also like to thank our
sponsors, Sun Microsystems, the U.S. State Department, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), the International Science Foundation, RELARN
and Stack, Ltd., all of whom have contributed funds, equipment and support
to help make this initiative possible.   And a special thank you to our
home institutions - the Pushchino Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology
of Microorganisms and The University of Tennessee - without whose generous
support "Friends and Partners" would never have been born - and to our
bosses, V.K. Akimenko and Homer Fisher who have encouraged the development
of this project from its beginning.  Finally, we want to offer special
thanks to our staff - Angie Croft, Anita Colliate, Dima Kichukov, Elena
Vorobieva, Ellee Margileth, Evgeny Mitkovsky, Sasha Ovchinnikov, Sveta
Sandler, Tanya Stepanova, and Tigran Arsumanov.  These folks give a lot of
heart as well as many long hours to this project and are responsible for
the improvements made to this new server.

Our hope for "Friends and Partners" remains founded in the belief that a
community of like-minded individuals, working together to communicate and
share information on the 'Net, can help further the improved understanding,
trust, and cooperation we all desire between our countries.

Please let us know your comments and suggestions about the new server (and
please sign the guestbook!).  As always, you can send your questions,
comments, suggestions to:

Natasha Bulashova                         Greg Cole
IBPhm                                     University of Tennessee
Pushchino, Russia                         Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
natasha at alice.ibpm.serpukhov.su           gcole at solar.rtd.utk.edu
                                          Phone/Fax: 423/974-7277; 974-8022

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