acknowledgements

The work set this page’s precedent itself, in its own pages, in 2000. The editor’s thank-yous there ran in one short line, and in this order: “to Scott Burns, to Caucus Systems, and to The Meta Network.” This roll follows that precedent in its own words — the period line first, the edition’s longer account after — and names, in turn, the writers, the founder and the house, the machinery they wrote on, the classroom next door, the witnesses’ keepers, the chronicler, the missing, and the readers. Every name on this page is here because the work, or its survival, is owed to them. The sources behind every name here are gathered in the bibliography.

the writers

To the nineteen who wrote item 8, under the names they printed: chris abraham, Hope O’Keeffe, Ginny Little, Dirk Flinthart, Katherine Blanke (KAT), Red, Shawn Nicolen, Phillip J. Rhoades, Sarah Neyaz, Aaron Webb, Netiva Caftori, Justin Sacks (Pell), spaceboy, Elizabeth Lower-Basch, Susan Galleymore, Lavinia Weissman, Kathy Madden, Michelle Nolan and Barry Bluestein. Between September 2, 1997 and August 31, 1998 they answered one another 241 times in one running thread — poems, stories, jokes, lessons, griefs and weather. The names stand here exactly as they stand in the work, pen names and all; each writer’s strand is gathered in the index of writers.

The editor stands in this roll as one of the nineteen: he began the item, posted 8:0, and wrote sixty of the 212 surviving responses, the largest single share; the word the work travels under, coelaboration, is his coinage.

the founder, and the house

In memory: Frank L. Burns (1939–2003), founder of The Meta Network in 1983 and president of Metasystems Design Group. Item 8 ran in the artist conference of his network, on his company’s software, in rooms his people kept. The edition records the debt with gratitude.

To Scott Burns, system administrator of the whole enterprise — thanked first in the work’s own pages in 2000, ahead of Caucus Systems and The Meta Network themselves, and thanked first among the living here. The Caucus manuals still show his accounts working their examples. Keeping the rooms running was his job, and the work’s own thanks put him first for it.

To Metasystems Design Group — Metanet, as the classroom’s own published account names the company — and to The Meta Network, the house itself; and to Caucus Systems, named in those same thanks of 2000, which in time carried the software onward. What the house was, room by room, is told in the context pages.

the machinery

To Charles Roth, who wrote Caucus. Every room of The Meta Network in this history — the artist conference, the classrooms, the conferences of a working decade — ran on his software, and this edition’s account of it rests on his own Reference Guide. In February 1995 he wrote CML in about a month — the language every Caucus web page is written in — and the conferences went onto the web in it. The 212 surviving responses were all written inside the form his software set: a numbered thread of replies, kept in a room.

Behind him stands Robert Parnes, whose CONFER, written at the University of Michigan in 1975, invented the form that Caucus and PicoSpan both descend from; and beside him Marcus D. Watts, whose PicoSpan ran the sibling rooms of The WELL — cousins by software, as the context pages have it. To Tom Mandel and the people of Screen Porch, who carried Caucus onto the web — their 1998 announcement of Caucus 4.0 is among this edition’s period paper — and to the stewards of CaucusCare, who keep the software, now open, and its archive.

And to Lisa Kimball: partner at Metasystems Design Group from 1984, founder of the Electronic Networking Association in 1985 — and, for this edition above all, the documenter who in 2004 interviewed Charles Roth inside his own software and published the interview at caucuscare.com. This edition’s account of Caucus rests on that interview and on his Reference Guide; the debt is named here because it is owed here.

the classroom next door

To Ginny Little — Ginny to everyone — teacher, and Organizer of the EFA conferences, whose Creative Writers on the Net, run through the Education for the Arts program of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency, was the classroom next door to the artist conference. Her program brought the January 1998 writers — “the flood that made the river,” as this edition’s account of the work puts it — and her students stand in this work’s roll, Shawn Nicolen among them. By the editor’s testimony, printed in the context pages, his own end of her course was taught from 1996 by dial-up, from his apartment at 1101 East Capitol Street in Washington, DC, overlooking Lincoln Park. The writers in this work came from her end of it.

To those students, then — the teenagers of the Kalamazoo districts who wrote to one another across their districts and were told, when the machinery failed them, to “email chris and he can help you.” The instruction is printed in the context pages, and the traffic ran both ways: her students got a person to email when the technology failed, and the artist conference got its January 1998 writers out of her classroom.

A second debt on this page is owed to Phillip J. Rhoades, one of the nineteen: the surviving export of the EFA and WMU conferences — the classroom half of this history — was taken in November 1999 through his session. Without that capture the classroom next door would be a rumour in this edition; with it, it is a record, and the edition is grateful for both the taking and the keeping.

the witnesses’ keepers

To the copies, and to everyone who carried them. To the Plone copy, which travelled the years on a weblog until this edition was built from it; to the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine kept the capture of the work’s own site taken on December 11, 2000 — the second witness, the one that proves the first; and to the partial third witness, a single response agreeing with both word for word, whose keeper is unknown and thanked anyway. The collation this edition prints rests on those three keepings, copy by copy; the witnesses are set out in full in the colophon.

the chronicler

To Howard Rheingold, whose The Virtual Community (1993) named the era while it was still happening. His Associates pages still stand, carrying the team page and its period biographies; this edition relies on one of those biographies for a fact it could not otherwise print.

the missing, and the readers

To the twenty-nine responses that survive in neither copy, and to whoever wrote them: the gaps in this edition are printed under their numbers, in the river and on their own pages. Should a copy of any of them ever surface, the colophon’s invitation stands: send it, and it will be restored to its number with thanks.

Last, to the readers and the listeners. The writers wrote to be read, and the work has been read in every keeping it has had: in 1998, through the weblog years, in the Archive’s capture, and in this edition, where it can also be heard read aloud. Thank you for reading.

Corrections, and news of surviving fragments, are welcome at the address in the colophon — cabraham@gmail.com — where the edition’s terms also stand. The debts above are stated as carefully as the evidence allows; if one has been misstated, the correction will be printed, and credited to whoever sends it.

And one debt stands behind all of these, named last because it came first: this item was begun to recreate My Name is Scibe (1994), the collaborative hyperfiction the editor had co-written three years earlier, in ARTS WIRE’s rooms and on The WELL. The sister edition’s own roll of debts stands at scibe.org/acknowledgements.html.