After a couple of experiments with course-specific web conferencing I decided not to use them, because lack of participation made them less and less interesting until traffic decayed to none.

Instead, I created in Spring '00 a University-Wide WebBoard called BUGHOUSE, and advertised this across campus as widely as possible hoping that something in it would catch popular interest. It did.

After two months it had surely caught on, but there were a few problems as well. First, it was impossible to identify actual users. Second, there were some small funding issues to sort out. The first problem was remedied with a new plan to send start-up passwords to an neiu e-mail account. The second one remains, though it is minor. In the meantime, the Provost (who supported BUGHOUSE) left, and the conferencing software (WebBoard) was discontinued. So, when support of the next Provost is certain, funding found (perhaps the *next* student government will support this effort?), and when a new software program can be tweaked for this purpose, BUGHOUSE will likely reappear.

In the meantime, read more about it at