Community Networking in Europe and Elsewhere:

From July 9-11, 1999 in Catalonia, a semi-autonomous "nation" within Spain, in the prosperous city of Barcelona, I had the good fortune to attend the 2nd European Conference on Community Networks along with representatives from eight or so European countries, Russia, Australia, Japan, Argentina, Canada, and the US. ECN '98 (www.bcnet.upc.es/ecn98) was clearly the most international community network conference yet convened.

Arthur Serra, an anthropologist turned community networker at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya where the conference was being held, deserves kudos for introducing a number of important related topics into the conference. These included discussions on how information and communication technology may alter the shape of the city in the future and how journalism may evolve in response to changes in technology and policy. One interesting presentation that I unfortunately had to miss (since I was a panelist in another session) was by Gerry McGovern on an ambitious Irish project to classify local documents on the web using the Dewey Decimal System. (Although this "industrial age" approach may be distasteful to the digerati, classification may be one of the best hopes for "democratizing" data.) Gerry believes that the "tributaries of local information need to be joined to the rivers of the mass media" and is involved in a major project to do so. Leandro Navarro from Barcelona discussed the important complementary work of the Association for Progressive Communications (http://www.apc.org) which has affiliates in 133 countries. Noam Chomsky, Rigoberta Menchz Tum, Adolfo Pirez Esquivel, Josi Ramos Horta, , Cees Hamelink, Eduardo Galeano and others will be speaking at their upcoming conference 'Foro Internacional: Comunicacion y Ciudania" ( http://www.ecuanex.apc.org/foro_comunicacion/) September 9 - 11, 1999 in El Salvador.

One of the high points of the conference week, for me, was a visit to RavelNet ( http://www.bcnet.upc.es/ravalnet/) a community computer center for youths in a poorer working class neighborhood of Barcelona. Tucked away in an obscure courtyard, a hundred or so meters from a square where El "Noi del Sucre" (the "Sugar Kid") an anarchist leader had been born earlier this century, is a hangout for young people who can learn about computers, send e-mail or surf the web. The community computing center occupies several rooms and is decorated with grafitti, movie posters, and political and social handbills, old couches, and a pingpong table. The atmosphere of too-much cigarette smoke (for me) in the 80 degree Barcelona evening was a stark contrast to the air conditioned conference auditorium.

Many issues that arose in the first "Ties that Bind" community networking conference at Apple in 1994 are still with us today. Should community networking advocates provide access, or will the market take care of that without our help? What about Hot Mail and the other free e-mail services? Can't users put up with a few advertisements? (After all, beggars can't be choosers!) And the 64 million peseta question: What should national governments and local authorities be doing? Certainly many North American and European governments are promoting access to electronic services in various ways. But as Fiorella de Cindio, the founder of the Milan Civic Network, points out, scarcely 7% of what are called civic or community networks in Italy have any support for public participation; they are simply web sites. Also, as several conference attendees told me, they suspect that their governments' motivation for improving access may be for cheaper, and, hence, degraded, "delivery of government services." Many people from European countries with strong social welfare programs are all already unhappy with "their" government's retreat from social responsibilities.

One of the most important lessons of the conference is that local conditions are very important to development of community networks (and very different from each other). The question then becomes how do individual community networking efforts share expertise and how could they link together to build a stronger community networking movement. Although the location of ECN '99 (or whether there will be one) has not been determined, there were recurring discussions on the idea of a relatively large international community networking conference in 1999 or 2000, and a mailing list to discuss this and other project ideas is being set up. This is an exciting idea and, obviously, an extremely challenging project. Nevertheless there are many signs indicating that the time might be right for such an undertaking.

At the same time that I attended the conference, I've been reading The Power of Identity, volume II of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture by Manual Castells, the Spanish author currently at the University of California at Berkeley. Castells forecasts that severe -- and deadly -- societal dislocations are likely to occur if globalism continues its march without a thorough consideration and appreciation of the meaning that local community and culture provide. If this reading is correct and if Castells is right, community networks may turn out to be critical new institutions. If this is true, then the US government, the European Union, and other organizations and institutions along with activists around the world need to move beyond rhetoric and consultants' reports and seriously think about how -- and if -- democracy and local control will exist in cyberspace.