The HUG Online Discussion developed from requests for somewhere online that HUG workers and members could use to discuss issues without the need to meet in one place. Given the geographical difficulties of getting together across the region, this seemed like a great idea.

Having set this up, we have a way to go to understand the way online discussions can work, indeed they will work the way we want them to in the end. But this is a bit of an experiment and it's one of several online discussions set up for HUG recently.

At present this discussion (or Bulletin Board, or BBS) is hosted by a third party web site, ezboard. This made it easy to set up but we don't have as much control of how it works as we might if we ran it all on our own web site. However, it seemed best to get something up and running now and use it as an opportunity to understand in practice what the features of a discussion system should be before investing time and money in something of our own.

So, it's an experiment as well as a resource. There will be space in it to raise issues about its operation and development as well as all those more vital issues about our work across the HUG network.

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