Donna is able to persuade Cameron to meet about the project, the meeting to take place coinciding with Cameron and Tom's trip to the States to visit with family over the Christmas holidays. Donna feels forced to invite Joe if only to appease Cameron. Joe, in turn, invites Gordon, believing he having useful input seeing that they worked together on the NSFNET project. And Cameron invites Tom. The project, as Donna initially lays out to them and which uses Gordon and Joe's work on the NSFNET as the impetus, is to create a means for all the individual networks worldwide to be connected to each other - the world wide web or the Internet or whatever else they may want to call it. Those around the table each are excited by certain aspects but have some issue with the project, whether it be defining purpose, having conflicting visions of form, having issues with timing, or other issues. Joe brings important information to the table based on a conference he recently attended about relatively new concepts such as html and http. But as the meetings hit roadblocks with some seemingly not promising to attend any other future meetings seeing the project as unworkable, certain bridges may still be burned, other bridges may just be catching fire, while other burnt bridges that want to be rebuilt may not be able to rebuilt based solely on perception between the parties.
—Huggo