Four years ago Pat Dinkelaker and I made the decision to utilize the internet to post a few of the papers that we had co-authored. Although these had been previously published or presented elsewhere, they were no longer readily available. And the number of requests that we received for copies exceeded what we could handle in the way that we were accustomed to at the time - which involved photocopying the material, stuffing it into envelopes, and carting it down to the post office. Electronic publishing offered a more or less cost-effective way of making the material freely and immediately available to anyone who was interested - anyone, at least, who had a connection to the internet. At that time we were also actively conducting long-distance conversations on topics related to these papers with a number of different people, via telephone and letter. Many of these individuals were also in conversation with each other, in various groupings. We all found the exchange of ideas tremendously productive and stimulating. Inspired to move in new directions by the comments and concerns raised by various members, each participant in this informal group of self-selected participants often unexpectedly found him or herself on paths on which [s]he would not have embarked had it not been for others in the group. Each was standing, as it were, on the shoulders of the others - as paradoxical as that image might at first seem. The group was spread out over vast geographical distances. So the time, cost, and effort that it would have taken for every member to personally update others by telephone or letter was prohibitive. The internet held out the promise of a new method for accomplishing a quicker and easier mode of interaction. So Pat and I went about learning whatever we needed to know in order to post not only our own papers, but also the thoughts and feelings of others in this loose-knit group in which we found ourselves in the middle. In order to do this we had to become familiar with various computer languages, graphics programs, list servers, and so on. It soon became apparent to us that the languages that had been designed for this purpose, in combination with recent rapid advances in personal computing hardware, made it possible for a single individual to utilize his or her desktop for sophisticated computational tasks. These, in turn, could be easily shared with others via cross-platform scripts written in languages like javascript, and perl - scripts that were readable on-line with free 'browsers' that were easily obtained. Such languages, which had been designed with the goal of interactive computing in mind, derive much of their power from two features around which they are constructed: their availability (as freeware) and their flexibility (which results from the open-architecture format in which such languages are typically written). Nevertheless, when we first began to utilize the internet, we could not find many who were taking full advantage of the technology. Or many who seemed to understand - or even have an interest in - the capacity of the web for collaboration, group brainstorming, or social organizing. We tried, to the best of our ability, to do some of these things. And we ended up, four years later, with a suite of web-sites on which the equivalent of more than 2,000 hardcopy pages of material is currently posted. Presented therein are the ideas, feelings, and experiences of an ever-changing community of individuals - activists, artists, scholars, therapists, scientists, and just plain ordinary people who have had something rather extraordinary to say on some very complex topics and issues. None of this was planned. We keep the site as it has come to look after four years of a gradual accumulation of materials, and an expansion of our own scope of interest over time, hoping that the site captures the flavor of a work in progress. This may be a little disconcerting to the visitor. But think of it as the intellectual equivalent of an archeological dig and the process of navigating the sites may become a somewhat less daunting prospect. In developing the materials that appear here we generated a number of homemade computer scripts. These are functional scripts that we wrote with specific purposes in mind. We wanted to do something in particular - like test what various colored fonts would look like against the background of a page of another color, or create a window that simulates a slide-show projector for showing art works, or demonstrate how a musician might begin to understand the relationship between the notes on the fretboard of a guitar in some esoteric tuning and the notes of a harmonica played in 'blues' style - and we knew of no other (affordable) software for accomplishing these goals. So we wrote our own, usually in javascript. Some of these scripts turned out to actually be useful. So we are happy to continue to share these products, in the spirit of cooperation and mutual aid, and as a way of paying the community back (or, as they now say, 'forward') for what we have received from others. We hope to make those available in the 'jscripts' section in the near future. Most important to us, however, is not the technology, or the opportunity that the web offers us to disseminate our own ideas, or the ideas of colleagues and associates. Nor are we really concerned with the number of people who can be reached in this remarkable new fashion, although we have had hundreds of thousands of visitors - more than we ever imagined might possibly be interested in the sometimes esoteric areas into which issues raised at our sites have led us. What is important to us is how the internet might give voice to those without a voice, and the unique manner in which it can accomplish this feat. It permits a type of sharing of information that is decentralized and non-heirarchial - a 'making public' that is not under the control of a single decision-making authority, like most ordinary hard-copy 'publishing' ventures continue to be. As long as vested corporate interests do not succeed in usurping the power of the internet, or in imposing prohibitive costs on those who would utilize it to build genuine community, it may someday fulfill its potential as an infrastructure on which a free-form web of reciprocal relationships can be created - a 'public sphere', 'public forum', or 'public sector' the likes of which has regretably been missing in the modern world for some time now. We are pleased to have had the opportunity to actively explore, in some small way, the potential that this new medium has for connecting each of us with others in profoundly meaningful new ways. And it is in this spirit that we continue this work at our new home on the internet - tap3x.net. John Fudjack, 2001