The POSIX 1003.21 standards committee has among its leadership members of the staff of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) who have been exposed to CASCADE. With their permission and support, efforts were undertaken during the summer of 1995 to provide functionality for CASCADE that would support the IEEE mock ballot process. While the committee members who were housed at SEI were familiar with the X Window System and had hardware that would support its use, SEI had X protocol firewalls that prevented the serving of X Windows to machines at SEI. The development of a client server version of CASCADE will address this issue in part by moving to RPC with the local client responsible for the interface. At the same time the issue of where to place the server so that access can be extended to all of the interested parties is one that will require ongoing attention. For the study, a server local to SEI would prevent use by group members outside the institution, while a server outside SEI (e.g., at the University of Pittsburgh) would allow access to many participants but would deny access to the interface to the primary editors at SEI.
The committee had made extensive use of the Scribe Document Processing System for preparation of the drafts of the standards. In addition, they used a mail exploder to share documents and to make comments. The fact that Scribe had been used for markup of the documents provided an opportunity to test interactions with a structured (SGML-like) markup language in CASCADE. The use of mail exploders provided an opportunity to experiment with agents that would provide some automated processing of mail. In addition, this kind of mail integration would allow us to explore how mail might be used to link individuals who did not have full interactive access to CASCADE.