POSEIDON
Call For Mariners - What is Poseidon
Fellow Hellenes, Philhellenes, and history Scholars,
The three underwriters of this letter took the initiative to establish a committee that will build a "Hemerologion" (ship captain's log book) HTML document, with the title "HELLAS AND THE SEA". This page will outline the major events involved in the development of Hellas (Greece) as a prominent maritime nation from the ancient to modern times providing information about Hellenic activities related to the sea.
Evangelos is a maritime shipping person, Thanos is a computer professional, active in the internet community for Hellenic matters, and Michalis is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto Canada. All have been volunteer their time to organize and chart this voyage.
Evangelos' Greek Maritime company (Rigos Chartering Inc.) is located in New York City. It arranges the transportation of oil, on behalf of major oil companies, from its production site to industrial nations on a world wide basis. He is also a volunteer member of an ARPA (Advance Research Project Agency, http://www.arpa.mil) project called Maritech/NSnet, to electronically unite the Maritime community on a Global basis.
The ARPA is credited for the creation of the internet, the GPS (Global Positioning System) and several other technological innovations. ARPA's network NSnet, is divided into seven sections. Maritime is one of the sections in which Rigos is in charge. For more information you can send a message to info@nsnet.com or visit the web pages of NSnet (http://www.nsnet.com) or Rigos (http://www.wdsg.com/~rigos) also listed in the business page of HELLAS (http://velox.stanford.edu/hellas).
The plan is to divide the home page into historical and traditional periods, and establish sub-committees to do research for each period. We need history majors to contribute with their knowledge of the historical periods, we need archeologists to give us their expertise on the ancient times, we need sportsmen to build the sports section of the page and we need HTML developers to build the web pages, and we need plain enthusiasts who want to volunteer their spare time to do research on any subject as required. Finally, we need history mariners to tell us the sea story of HELLAS AND THE SEA.
This CALL is for mariners. The task we have embarked upon is monumental. Tens of people are joining together from all over the world without even knowing each other for this cause. If you want to join us in this effort, read the attached Poseidon Hemerologion, and follow the directions how to become a crew member.
_________________________________________________________________________ Capt. Evangelos Rigos (New York) rigos@dts.net Thanos Voudouris (Washington D.C.) tvoudour@csc.com Michalis Kolios (Toronto Canada) mkolios@oci.utoronto.ca
Hemerologion (Outline)
The aim of Poseidon is to present information about HELLAS AND THE SEA.
Poseidon will create a hypertext (HTML) document "Hmerologion", containing all of this information for publication on the World-Wide-Web (WWW). We will need the help of sailors in this effort.
Here is what you can do in order to volunteer your expert help:
THE PROJECT
POSEIDON EXECUTIVE OFFICERS
General Tehcnical help and support to all poseidon members.
Creation of tools like perl scripts, CGI scripts, HTML skeletons etc
Assistance in the drafting of the HEC Specification.
Members:
Promote our Poseidon effort and HELLAS and the SEA
Members:
Oversee/design of photos drawings 3D etc
Members:
Introduction of new members
Members:
Bylaws: Poseidon's "Constitution"
Please read the announcements we have made so far as we proceed with
the project. The following announcements constitute Poseidon's
charter. If you UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT them, then the only thing left
is to officially become a team member.
Along with your acceptance letter, please send a SHORT resume to
become public and be placed with the others we currently have. You
will be placed in the Poseidon mailing list and your name will be
added to the "Crew List" on the Poseidon Web page. After the official
acceptance you should start your work in the group you have selected.
Express freely your ideas at Poseidon. If you want to place an announcement at HELLAS or any other list requesting volunteers or some material, you must present this request to one of the three project Captains for clearance. Furthermore, only team officers should make announcements on behalf of their section.
Finally, make sure that when you are making an announcement that you sign the posting with your affiliation to the project.
Poseidon is a non-profit and non-political project. We must avoid at any cost any political involvement of a sovereign State. We do not want Poseidon to end up as a propaganda tool. We can request help from officials of any government or agency as long as there are no obligations or conditions imposed that are contrary to the nature of Poseidon.
Crew List
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Poseidon Project FAQ - (Version 1.2 06 Jun 95)
Originally maintained by Nikos Kontodimos <nbk@howdy.wustl.edu>
Maintained by Michael Kolios <mkolios@oci.utoronto.ca>
Poseidon is a project that has as goal to collect information about Greece and its development as a prominent maritime nation from the ancient to modern times. The data will be presented in HTML format, suitable for publication on the World Wide Web (WWW). By doing so, we hope to show the world the contributions of Greece to modern civilization through the development of a strong fleet.
As Philip Santas said in a mail:
"To these I have to add that if the project is research oriented, public domain and does not involve material profit, then there are far less restrictions concerning copyright or legality. I will bring you a couple of examples from academia and the business.
When original work is published in a conference, the author of a paper in the CS field usually transfers the copyright of his paper to the organization which publishes the proceedings (typical case for CS is ACM). However, the paper can be of the copyright.
The second example involves real world companies. I will not mention the names of the companies, but I will refer to the states where they are located. Some famous company A in Illinois produced software S. Many parts of this software have been copyrighted and the package brings much money to A. Some research group from a famous university in California decided to make a better version of S. They used their own software, their own experience, etc. but the result was something that looked much like S (this was their initial target), being better in some aspects and worse in other. Thus, their research project was successful. The final package became public domain. Company A decided to proceed legally against this. They didn't gain anything. It must be clear why. "
Some useful subject lines in the library of congress are:
Triremes. Navigation--Greece--Athens--History. Sea-power--Greece--History. Greece--History, Naval. Naval art and science--History. Ships, Wooden. Naval art and science. Greece. Navy.
The announcements are the by-laws of the project. One can view them as a "constitution" that hopefully will resolve/prevent any problems. Poseidon is going to operate in an organized fashion so we felt that a "legal backbone" was needed.
No one wants anybody else to lose his/her job or to fail in his/her classes because of Poseidon. Right now (in the beginning of the project) it looks as if "sea-sickness" has befallen some of us. If you feel the size of the project/your own part is overwhelming you, relax, take a deep breath and we can work the problem out. One hour late, one day late, even one week late is not going to cause a catastrophe. Of course this does not mean "be sloppy", "no one else depends on your work, so who cares" etc. It just means "don't be tense". We sailed, the sky is clear, the ship is sea-worthy, we will reach the port.
Hopefully, each subcommittee will have a group of people and thus if somebody is unable to do his/her part for a certain period of time, the sub-committee will be able to deal with it. Nevertheless, if more support is requested, we will try to find it.
Everybody. As long as one wants to contribute, nationality, religion, political beliefs, race, color, gender, job occupation, etc do not matter. Our objective is to enlighten the international community about the nautical Greek miracle through the history of mankind. And as Capt. Rigos said: "The non-Greek crewmembers of Poseidon will be our best ambassadors."
As Michael Kolios said: " a "leader" should be viewed more as a coordinator, rather than a captain ... maybe team coordinator would have been a better way of calling it ..."
As Capt Rigos said: "We have vision each sub-committee as a group of people who are going to work together. Hopefully each group will have more than one researchers. The leader will represent this group and will talk with us on behalf of the Group. All of us are very busy. The only way to minimize the burden to few people is by a good organization."
I asked: "We just begun, so I do not yet know how things are going to turn out. Nevertheless, how do we replenish? There is going to be natural attrition and perhaps even un-natural attrition ( :-) ). How is that going to be accounted for?"
and Capt. Rigos replied: "I agree with your first line. No one knows how is going to turn out. As we said. Poseidon is sailing into "unchartered waters"."
We have not decided on this yet. We would like something more than just a mentioning, but also something that would be pleasant enough to read using a web browser (i.e. not a pages of pages of boring text). An example of how we might want to model this is at: http://www.synergy.net/Piazza/piazza.html. These are not intended to be original research articles, however research must be done in order to collect the important information in each period. There is a lot of flexibility on the format since this is not well defined yet. As we go on, we will see how it will work out...
The HTML developers will not be related to each other, therefore, we see each section to develop each own "color". With this way instead building a stereotype we will have a variety. In Rigos home pages, if you see one, you have seen all. In Poseidon each section will be different.
These "liaisons" will help us with contacting people in the government that might be able to assist us in our project somehow. For example, maybe we could get access to government information about issues related to the sea or they will point us in the right direction. Or, they can give us a list of government agencies (museums, intelligence contacts) that will help us in a specific field. Furthermore, these are people that will help promote the awareness of this page to others that would normally not be aware of it. Since this is a tool for collecting and displaying information, we should make people aware of it, and the higher up they are, the more difficult to "inform" them.
At this stage, the Greek liaison is working to obtain permission from George Vasiliou, and also is collecting information from the Ministry of Merchant Marine about Poseidonia. Eventually we may need statistical information about the current status of the Greek Merchant Navy.
With reference to the US liaison, the need has not developed yet but I predict that in the immediate future this connection will help our project.
Yes. All people putting in time will do so volunteering, and there will be no charges for people that would want to access the page. It is not clear to me yet how a marketing specialist will be used at this point, however, there are concerns that we might want to buy a computer and access to the Internet, thus involving some costs. This has not been decided yet, and are still working on it.
As Capt. Rigos said: "I hear again and again. what we need a marketing specialist, what we need a press release "
Marketing is not oriented only with profit. You can market an idea, you can market your name, you can market a home page. Our objective is to make aware as many people as possible at Greece and especially outside Greece.
We need exposure, we need someone to go out and tell everyone on the Internet and outside the Internet that a group of ambitious people are building the history of HELLAS and the SEA. That will be the job of professional people.
You can have the best product and if you do not market it properly, it is worth nothing, On the other hand you can have the worst product and by proper marketing you can promote it.
Our product is HELLAS and the SEA. We want everyone on earth to go and visit it. We want to make everyone curious enough to go and see it.
I visualize the job of marketing as:
a.- Press Releases b.- Weekly news letter for the public c.- Communicating with the public with a professional mode and without emotions d.- Informing the Governments, museums, institutions libraries, marine sides of our project
We do not know. Temporarily, we have the call for volunteers in HTML format at velox.stanford.edu. Ideally, we will have it somewhere where the threat of "kicking us off" is minimized. Potential sites may include universities that guarantee us the resources or government funded agencies, or even our own access point.
Many Universities allow certain use of some of their machines for Internet information purposes. Stanford has some of the biggest Internet web sites like YAHOO, news services, and many others. We have an allotment of disk space to use on one of the machines. This is the one that HELLAS is on. This is not Poseidon's site. The call for volunteers is there for publicity since HELLAS has a big user base, and at the same time serves as a temporary home.
The HEC stands for the Hellenic Electronic Center. The primary purpose of the HEC is to unify electronically the information of hellenic content available on the Internet and act as a resource that will diffuse the hellenic culture around the world. We envision a set of dedicated computers that will act as servers (somewhere in North America) and run common utilities required for the transport of information and software to people that are interested in Greece and have access to the Internet. It is however in its initial phase and we have to get the financial means to support this effort. It is related to Poseidon since it was realized that such a resource would be required to house this (and other) projects. The members of Poseidon have initiated the effort to create such a resource.
We communicate in English on the list Poseidon because there are other members that do not know Greek. Although the vast majority of members will probably know (or be) Greek, other experts will not (such as Bill Moore). We want this project to be a showcase for everyone; we did not want to make it too "esoteric" by restricting access to Greek people only. However, apart from the Poseidon list one can obviously communicate with other members in Greek if one finds this better.
Poseidon is not for the Greeks. We are not building our ship to go inside and say to each other how nice it is. We are building it for the global community to stop and see what the marine contributions of Hellas were and are. For us Poseidon does not mean too much; we know it; we have lived it. It is for the Global community. We have to communicate these ideas in English. On the other hand, we cannot communicate among ourselves in Greek and build something in English.
The purpose of the list is to provide a *common* forum for the exchange of ideas and announcements concerning the project. This is so all members are updated about the project and its direction.
Our crewing started from HELLAS list. The first volunteers were from Academia like professors of various Universities, and university students. The second wave of volunteers were Greeks that are in some capacity related to the Internet. We are happy to have this group with us because they are the ones who will help us make our dream to come true.
Wrong question. Anyone can join for any part of the project one wants. The right question is what is missing right now. Well, the crew is very weak as far as real seamen are concerned. There are only 2 marine people and more are needed. In general, nevertheless, there are a quadrillion of things people can do that probably no one has thought of yet. What things? well, no one has thought of them yet (one idea could be "greek phrases related to the sea", another one could be "greek islands folk songs/dances" etc)
We do not really know how much time it will take us to complete the project but we envision the commencement day to take place at POSEIDONIA 1996 which will be the first week of June, 1996. We are in touch with the organizers of Poseidonia. We are in touch with Mr. Vokos of SEATRADE and POSEIDONIA to find a way of co-operation.
The Greek government is aware of the project. The Embassy of Ottawa was informed since the creation of the project. Then we discussed the project with Mr. Gemelos, the manager of the NY office of Press and Information.
Does the Greek Government care? We do not know. Time will tell. Do not forget that governments do not respond to new ideas very fast. Poseidon is not only a new idea, it is also a pioneer one because no one has created such a project before. Therefore, if there is a delay to the reaction of the Greek government it is understood but we do expect some kind of support in the future. When we come with government employees in conduct we emphasize to them that Poseidon is over and above any political motivations and we consider it as a National project. We will not allow any politics to penetrate Poseidon but we will accept their unconditional help.
Well, this is only to be expected. We are a very diverse group, with different interests, different opinions, different sense of humor etc. Plus, many people write the same way they speak, forgetting that facial expressions are not present here, and much of what they can convey with words in a face to face situation is lost through e-mail.
No exact answer can be given to this problem. Talk about it with whomever you have the problem, and if it sounds pretty serious and it cannot be resolved between you and the other party, then ask for the captain's help. We hope that you will never reach this stage.
Resigning is the easiest thing one can do. All it takes is one e-mail. Nevertheless, keep in mind that no one came aboard on this journey just because of the personalities that were in it. The purpose was not to meet people and get along with them, (although that would be more than just nice) but to create something.
Hellenic Electronic Center (HEC)
Currently, all of the computer related services available to people interested in Greece are scattered all over the world and difficult to track down, even for people experienced in navigating through the integrated network of computers, the internet. These services are expected only to grow in the future as the number of people with access to the internet grows. Furthermore, some of these services exist in university controlled computing facilities (usually in the personal accounts of people with access to those computers), making the future of these databases and services uncertain. Apart from the justified limitations imposed by the computing facilities of these universities (in terms of space available and resources dedicated) the existence of these resources can be terminated at a computer administrators will.
Hence we propose the creation of a Hellenic Electronic Center that will provide a physical storage place and interface to information and software of hellenic content. We envision a set of dedicated computers that will act as servers and run common utilities required for the transport of information and software of hellenic content to people that are interested in Greece and have access to the internet. This will not only function as an important resource for the hellenes of the diaspora but will inform and help people interested in various aspects of the hellenic culture.
The H.E.C will store and provide information and links to information concerning Greece thus acting as a information server. Any person abroad or in Greece would have access to this and could find out about current status of foreign and domestic issues. The creation of the H.E.C would not only link together all of the resources available around the world, but house information and databases of relevance so that a home is guaranteed and well maintained. These databases are envisioned to be accessed by anyone at any time: a young child doing homework on Greek mythology; a university student doing a research project on current or ancient events in Greece; a businessman trying to find information about investment opportunities in Greece; a couple trying to plan their next vacation in Greece; a scientist looking for career opportunities or collaborations with others in Greece; a young first generation Greek trying to find out details about the military service. The list is truly endless.
Until fairly recently, this information was available only to technical people in research and academia. The profound and radical evolution however of communications and the internet has opened the opportunity to virtually anyone with a computer and a modem to access this information. This is thus the proper time to create such a organization. Many other organizations and companies have joined forces into promoting their cause by purchasing dedicated computers to act as their information servers. The growth of this process has so far been exponential and all indicators show that this will continue. Given the enormous growth rates of the internet, the potential exposure of Greece through this electronic forum cannot be overstated. Such an organization will help the diffusion of the hellenic culture around the world since it would provide access to information and services that would otherwise be cumbersome and difficult for many people to obtain. Just as the advent of the print helped to disseminate the hellenic culture around the world during the renaissance, it is hoped that this new communication medium can create a gateway to the hellenic culture and civilization.
It may be argued that such information depositories are already being formed in Greece and that such an effort is redundant. This is not true however. There will be no duplication of effort involved in this project. Its goal is to organize all the information pertaining to Greece as a collection of links to other places that already have this information and to house projects that originate from Hellenes of the diaspora. The number of the latter projects has been steadily increasing and is one of the prime motivators of creating such an organization. Furthermore, slow links across the Atlantic can severely handicap the capability to rapidly transport this information. This is specially true for hypertext documents rich in images and other multi-media applications (sounds, movie clips), which would be a must for some applications (such as promoting tourism in Greece). It is therefore important that such a service be initially installed somewhere in North America which arguably has one of the largest collections of hellenes of the diaspora and the largest number of people with access to the internet.
The timing in our opinion is perfect for such a project. The exposure Geece and its culture can get is potentially enormous. It is up to us however to find the funds and the manpower to carry out such a project. We all belive that in the end, hellenism will benefit from such a project.