i3magazine readers will have noticed a delay in the publication of the present issue of the magazine. Helen MacLean has stepped down as editor after having contributed her great skills in copy—editing and, whenever necessary, her good—humoured patience, to the first three issues of i3magazine. i3net is grateful to Helen for having helped getting the magazine off to a good start. i3magazine's new editor is Mimo Caenepeel from the University of Edinburgh. Mimo has an academic background in linguistics, with a PhD and many years of research experience in the area of text and discourse. For the past three years she has been the editor of ELSNews, the newsletter of ELSNET (the European Network in Language and Speech), a sister Network of Excellence to i3net. Being Belgian and having worked in France, Canada, the US and Scotland, she will feel at home within the cultural diversity of the i3 community. As to the future, we would like to have i3magazine increasingly reflect the most recent news, upcoming events and developments in the world at large relevant to the i3 community. We invite all readers to contact the editor (mimo@cogsci.ed.ac.uk) with anything that might be of interest to the growing readership of i3magazine. Niels Ole Bernsen

Where does an absolute beginner in i3 start, if the intended endpoint is the production of a new issue of i3magazine? Setting out with a combination of curiosity and the i3 web pages, I wondered first of all about the vision behind i3, and how the network came about. Jakub Wejchert was the obvious person to talk to, and this issue opens with his inspiring reflections on the origins of i3net, what makes it unique, and what its role in FP5 might be. In the process of listening to people, and reading what they sent me, some of the sources of vitality in i3 became clearer. Tim Brown talks about his experience of collaborating within i3, and the importance of the creative side of leadership. And Phil Ellis and Walter Van de Velde describe how their projects — part of Experimental School Environments (ESE), the new i3 research programme — actively involve those most real of communities: schoolchildren and their teachers. Halfway as we are between two i3 annual conferences, this issue provides a good vantage point to contemplate both events: members of the i3 community look backwards to last year’s project reviews at Nyborg, and forwards to the unfolding story (or play) of Community of the Future, planned for this Autumn’s conference in Edinburgh. Finally, it seemed instructive to complement the European perspective of i3 with related developments elsewhere, particularly in the USA. I welcomed the opportunity to include an interview with Adam Bosworth from Microsoft, in which he sets out his personal views on where intelligent information interfaces should be taking us in the near future. All of which gave me a place to start. I look forward to continuing the journey. Mimo Caenepeel

© 1998,1999,2000 i3net	-- Search i3net --	About the i3net web pages
Revised: 23 June, 1999.		Mail to webmaster@i3net.org