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Also participating were FAXinating Solutions (Steve Hatajlo and associate, who moved down to the Convention floor Friday morning), Language Master (George Bilokonsky, with his wife and 4 boys, Fri. and Sat.) and Jack Minsky of Apple Ukraine (all 3 days as duty permitted). Mardy Hutchinson of NetAxis (who supplied 2 free Internet accounts for the duration of the Workshop) attended most of Friday afternoon and left promotional material for distribution. Bob Valentine of MC3 (who supplied 3 racks of books) checked in daily.
Unexpectedly, Easy Ukrainian (Roman Bobyk) did not show up. MultiTYPE! (Adrian Lepki of Svitcom) sent promotional material which arrived Friday and was distributed Saturday and Sunday. Ted Murphy sent 6 copies of the Atlas of Ukraine of which 2 were sold.
B. Eighteen people attended on Friday, 30 on Saturday and only 9 on a very quiet Sunday morning until a mad rush of about 50 people at 14:30 hours signaled the end of the Convention proceedings. Thirty one of the 57 recorded participants had telephone numbers outside the Montreal area code 514.
[Several days prior to the Convention, I had contacted (or left answering machine messages with) about 150 Montrealers who had purchased $10.00 raffle tickets for our Dec. 4, 1994 Computer Show. Only 9 of the 18 who had made specific appointments and a still smaller fraction of the 62 "likely" or "maybes" showed up. Except for one exception, none of the teachers of Ukrainian school showed up. Once again, this illustrates the difficulty in attracting the general Ukrainian community to such events.]
On the other hand, virtually all the attendees were highly motivated, spent over an hour (or made repeated visits) and were intending to get on the Internet. The Convention delegates were highly complementary, suggested that such workshops be repeated at future conventions, but complained that Salon Huronie was not easily visible (2 floors up, accessible only via elevator).
C. Internet demonstrations:
These normally started with sending Email messages (using Eudora) between the two sites and sometimes reading incoming mail from UKES-SOCIAL. Next, after logging onto the NetAxis home page using Netscape and examining some of its features, Oleh Baran's www home page http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/WWW/oleh/ukr-info.html would often be the starting point for a journey through cyberspace to UCPB, UKES and sites in Ukraine. Switching between English and Ukrainian on http://www.osc.edu/ukraine.html was particularly impressive.
D. Ukrainian software demonstrations:
(a) Language Master was, by far, the most impressive software demonstrated. There is something almost magical in typing several simple sentences in English , clicking on TRANSLATE in the TOOLS menu and watching the Ukrainian translation pop up on the right hand side of the screen. [As with all translators, word for word translation is easy, the problem often arises with complicated declensions and idiomatic expressions.]
George Bilokonsky brought three progressive versions of the software: the simple word processor version in English, Ukrainian and Russian (with spell checking capabilities); the demo version of the translator (without printing capabilities); and the buggy gamma(?) version of the final product which Trident expects to release in several months.
(b) MultiTYPE! and Easy Ukrainian are best demonstrated in combination. First, one chooses a word processor (MSWrite, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Q&A Write, etc.); chooses one of several available Ukrainian or Russian keyboards; displays the keyboard in a window on the screen; chooses CYMulti from the font menu; and then toggles between English (Shift+Control keys on the left) and Ukrainian (Shift+Control keys on the right). All word processor functions such as bold, italic, size, superscript, subscript work normally.
Next, to demonstrate usage of the English-Ukrainian dictionary in Easy Ukrainian, one would click on a minimized icon to display an operational window of Easy Ukrainian; type in an English word and obtain the Ukrainian translation; highlight and copy the word into clipboard; go back to the original window; and paste the word from clipboard into the appropriate location of the (MultiTYPE!) document.
[If declension capabilities were added to Easy Ukrainian, this would be useful for users of Language Master (described above). Indeed, a "marriage" between the two might prove to be particularly blissful.]
(c) The Atlas of Ukraine was also particularly popular. One would start with the Introduction to demonstrate text and indicate the names of the authors. Next, one demonstrates maps, in particular, the "clickable" oblasts of Ukraine with basic data on each of the 25 oblasts. The database of the voting for the Declaration of Independence on 1991.12.01 was ideal to demonstrate the database menus such as Layers, Legend, etc. One would normally finish by demonstrating the diagrams.
During quiet periods, people would spend hours scanning the data available in the 225 "clickable" interfaces.
(d) Only one telephoned person had expressed interest in UkieType, which is one of the original DOS-based Ukrainian-English word processors. Unfortunately, he did not show up at the Workshop. A letter to the author, Steven Loboyko, in Illinois was returned and no telephone contact could be established. We do not know the present status of UkieType.
(e) Jack Minsky of Apple Ukraine had a small but devoted clientele who use the MacIntosh. He demonstrated the Ukrainian keyboard and operating system on his laptop. He contacted Micro Boutique who sent a representative for a 14:00 hrs Sunday special presentation for the Convention delegates, which was well received. He did a television interview with TeleUkraine describing the involvement of Apple in Ukraine -- 65 employees, 18 distributor-ships, training of programmers, etc.
It was reported that his participation in the Sunday morning Convention session on Business in Ukraine was extremely well received and that he was particularly popular at the Cabaret with his charm and wit.
E. Convention participation (Andrij Ukrainec and Michael Kostiuk):
We had originally invited Andrij Ukrainec to make a 20 minute presentation to the delegates at the Annual General Meeting (14:30 hrs, Sat. July 1, 1995), but because of work pressures he could not attend and the honor fell to Michael Kostiuk. Nevertheless, Andrij posted his proposed presentation on his personal www home page http://soma.crl.mcmaster.ca/~ukrainec/ which gives a very consise evolution of the UKES and UCPB mailing lists, Ukrainian involvement on the Internet and brief explanation of the Internet terminology for the uninitiated. We urge Andrij to maintain and update this document and for other home pages to establish links thereto.
On Saturday morning, Michael Kostiuk was informed that he was allotted only 10 minutes and did an admirable job in explaining the importance of the Internet to the delegates in this brief time.
In the new UCPBF executive, Michael Kostiuk was named VP for Communications and the new President, Raya Shadursky, is now very interested in using the to facilitate communications amongst the individual associations across Canada.
About 14:45 hrs. Sunday, July 2, 1995, when a large number of Convention delegates gathered in Salon Huronie, Michael Kostiuk gave a brief overview of the UCPB home page (concurrent with demonstrations on the computer monitors) and Will Zuzak took the opportunity to state his belief that within 5 years 95% of the businesses in Canada would have Email addresses and www home pages and that no organisation or society, which had not mastered the electronic communications technology, would be able to survive in the 21st century.
F. Conclusion:
Even my cynical self must admit that the Internet Workshop was reasonably successful (except financially) and that the Ukrainian community throughout the world and, especially, in Ukraine has made substantial progress in adapting to the emerging technologies typified by the. UKUG_MTL members may be proud to having contributed in educating the Ukrainian community in this area.
My personal thanks to the UKUG_MTL members who participated and, especially, to Victor "laid-back" Shumuk and Andrew "magic-fingers" Hryckowian, who carried the bulk of the load at the InterNet Workshop.
Victor spearheaded our involvement at the UCPBF Convention -- attending Organizing Committee meetings, keeping contact with Chateau Champlain personnel, discussing and arranging Internet access with NetAxis and maintaining his imperturbable good-nature throughout the Workshop.
Andrew was instrumental in configuring the software for the NetAxis sites during setup, downloading and installing new software and debugging all problems as they arose throughout the Workshop. His magic fingers seem to be able to elicit the solution from the ephemeral cyberspace even before the request has been fully articulated.
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