Directions In Advanced Computing (DIAC) ’97

Submitted by: Marcy J. Gordon, Esq. mgordon@pipeline.com

66 Pearl Street #307

New York, NY 10004-2443660

Creator of Psychicbabble in USED KARMA:

http://www.speakeasy.org/usedkarma

Doug stressed society’s need for people who understand communities as well as technology. The conference’s goal is to help us figure out where to do. Technology is not autonomous – it isn’t built by itself. Technology gets shaped by people, therefore it can be shaped by policy. How people use technology is critical to what gets done with it. Doug closed by saying: "Cyberspace is too important to be left to the digerati. The game is not over. Get involved."

Howard said: "People are the most important part of computer networks and connection people is the most important part of the Internet." We at the conference know that, but most people don’t. We need freedom of information in order to be citizens. We all need to talk to the people who have been conditioned to fear this technology and don’t understand its implications, both for good and ill. He pointed out that a computer connected to a television is a new communications medium.

Millions are currently using the Internet to create new communities, new kinds of businesses. We have taken steps down the wrong paths of monopoly censorship. We must go on the right path. This is a many-to-many medium where every box is a potential printing press, place of public assembly and schoolhouse.

Cyberspace is part of the civil society and public sphere. If we don’t protect our civil liberties in cyberspace, we won’t have any at all.

Then Howard related an anecdote about getting help on the Well for removing a tick from his 10-month-old baby faster than his pediatrician returned the call from the answering service. When one of his cyberfriends revealed that his son (whom the group had all played softball with) had leukemia, an online support group formed instantly. Medical people gave advice, leukemia survivors gave help. Needless to say, this proved to be an invaluable experience for the family.

Howard suggested we ask ourselves what is a real community and what is an illusion? Nation states were virtual communities – people suddenly thought of themselves as a country instead of as individual small towns. Think about how automobiles and television have shaped our communities. Think about the changes brought about by the printing press. You cannot have a democracy without a literate population, and literacy is not just about putting ink to paper. A literate population can govern itself. Mass media as a few-to-many medium where a very small number of people determine what the rest of us hear and see about events happening in the world. Television time is what buys politicians.

We need to think and talk about civil society and the public sphere. Howard suggested reading Robert Putnam’s The Decline of Civil Society: Bowling Alone. Putnam says there has been a decline in civic participation over the last 40 to 50 years. In Putnam’s The Strange Disappearance of Civic America, Putnam concludes that there is no way to explain the decline of civic participation except through television. The computer can connect people interactively, a meaningful contrast to television’s passive consumption modality. The potential power of networked computers can transform society.

Howard discussed the political philosophy of Jurgen Habermas’ view of the public sphere. The public sphere is where citizens meet to exchange views of political concern, such as coffeehouses, private societies, salons, etc. This should be a model for the public sphere today, so participants can have discourse to form public opinion. The debate process creates public opinion. Although online discourse was not necessarily what Habermas was talking about, his ideas are perfectly suited to the medium.

Many utopian hopes for the Internet have not been met, but it is too early to give up. The Computer Decency Act was not about protecting children from pornography, it was about controlling speech. The locus of control of information imparted to children should be the family. If we don’t teach our children and give them the opportunity to make their own moral choices, they won’t be able to. We need to shift the responsibility to the reader and student.

In addition, we must understand and communicate the potentials and pitfalls of computer and communications technology in plain language to our non-technical peers. We certainly cannot trust the mass media to do this, as evidenced by the greatly distorted media coverage hype involving Internet pornography.

Jamie pointed out that there is virtually no competition among local exchange carriers in this country, although the Telecommunications Reform Act passed a year ago. Media conglomeration is a major obstacle to freedom of information. Jamie referred to the corporate media ownership chart that appeared in The Nation last year. Jamie defined "library advocate" as someone who thinks information is a human right and should be free.

He urged us to reject the corporate model of buyouts and resources and focus on creating community spaces for dialectic. He described one such example called CLIC – Community Library Information Collaborative. Libraries face reduced public funding and privatization. Population and demographic shifts are rapidly changing, so libraries are continually challenged to keep pace with changing readership tastes.

Building a civic web means advocating along with other groups that want to preserve public and community spaces.

Peter Van den Bessalaar, Social Science Informatics, Univ. of Amsterdam, the

Peter discussed a community project called the Amsterdam Digital City. It is a website devoted to community affairs. The site is maintained by a non-profit organization, and has evolved from nothing into a 20-person operation. Amsterdam is a multicultural environment. Peter showed some slides of the Digital City website, which is located at http://www.dds.nl . The Digital City website links other web sites in community "squares." The system is text-based, with graphics and virtual reality components. Currently they are extending the virtual reality piece to other parts of Amsterdam

Digital City attracts people from all over Holland. They are predominantly male and young, but the demographics are becoming more normal. As people used the Digital City more, they had more face-to-face contact. The greatest use of the Internet was for e-mail, followed by searching.

Peter then presented some statistics on his group’s research. They collected statistics on the squares visited most frequently. Very few people were involved in local civic debate. They did not find differences between groups in the standard metrics such as how often people visited, how long they stayed, etc. It is interesting to note they found no significant difference between the digital and non-digital Amsterdam community in local civic participation. But Digital City is still monocultural and does not represent the real community at all.

Peter asked in what way can new means of communication and interaction result in new, restructured and sustainable communities?

Lodis discussed equitable access issues. His team in Austin sees the following as major obstacles: (i) lack of educational settings; and (ii) lack of teaching methods. Social capital is the intrusiveness of an adult into the life of someone else’s child. Teaching a child requires a supportive, trusting relationship with an adult. Unfortunately, too many people are growing up with no chances and no learning opportunities.

Lodis advocated the use of what he calls "radical common sense." The idea is not to win, but to solve problems. He stressed that teaching is mostly listening, and learning is mostly doing. He described the three stages of learning as follows:

1. When a child says "I can do it" they are saying something about choice and control. They don’t want help at this stage, they want to solve the problem on their own.

All three of these stages address a child’s sense of choice and control. Thus their curriculum stresses informal and incidental learning in natural settings.

Andy Gordon closed by saying we have to be self-critical of our own work instead of sticking to our dogma.

Steve discussed economic issues. He pointed out that 85% of the 100 poorest zip codes in the United States are on Indian reservations. The Oneida Nation had the first tribal website. The Oneidas have been a sovereign nation since Washington’s time. The Zapatistas have a website. The Karen refugees in Burma and Thailand have a website. The Saami (also known as the Laps, though they hate that name) in Scandinavia have a website. Native Hawaiians are teaching and preserving their language. All of these cultures are figuring out how to add words like "mouse," "hypertext" and "ftp" in ways that fit meaningfully into their languages.

There is more going on at indigenous peoples’ websites than selling crafts and CDs of ethnic music. The Pueblo people want to go into cyberspace, but the tribal elders voted against it. Many splits in Amish culture have been over discussions of technology. In 1986 they banned PCs, but they use calculators. They have telephone booths, they just don’t have telephones in their homes. There is even an Amish website at http://www.800padutch.com . (The webmaster is neither Amish nor a Mennonite, but he lives with an Amish family.)

Madeline is a former designer user interface designer for Bell Labs. Although she made a nice living, she decided that life had no meaning. When she went to Telluride and saw a community network it changed her life. Madeline defined community networking as follows. Community networking occurs when people or organizations get together. A real community network consists of commercial and educational developers, social services, libraries, government, education, business and non-profit organizations.

Madeline helped start the Boulder community networks. Most of the different groups don’t know each other except through their pre-conceived stereotypes. The collaborations that need to happen are not happening by themselves. That’s why an organization is needed to facilitate collaboration, and to consolidate forces at the grassroots level. We need to develop sustainable funding models. We must evaluate existing community networks and use them to provide a national voice. We need to shape an national policy at the local level in order to restructure today’s political realities.

Her group is publishing a field guide for creating community networks and will provide speakers and trainers. They want to involve new members of the community in these activities.

Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology), University Libraries, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Computer and communications technology has changed many disabled peoples’ lives. Adaptive technology exists that was considered science fiction only a generation ago. She mentioned Greg Bear’s comment that science fiction plays an important role in preparing us socially, psychologically and emotionally for new technologies. (She gave Geordie’s eyes as an example.)

There is a blind professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology named Dr. Coombs. Dr. Coombs holds a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin. He now heads an organization called EASI (Easy Access to Software Information). Until Dr. Coombs got a computer he did not realize how much he depended on other people. Now he reads his e-mail with a voice synthesizer.

She told the story of a man named James who has severe cerebral palsy. James can’t move his body much. However, he can move his head for dots and dashes, and communicates with a computer through Morse Code.

Nearly one in five Americans (19.4%) has a disability. One in ten (9.6%) have a severe disability. In 1994, 9.2% of college freshmen had a self-described disability, as compared with 2.6% in 1978. Adaptive technology has afforded much greater opportunities for disadvantaged students.

Adaptive technology can cover hardware and software. It can be expensive or inexpensive. Adaptive technology and access are issues that need to be addressed. Disabled people use both special and commercial software. We need to provide alternative texts in our websites and caption pictures. Adaptive technology has made a big difference in people’s lives. We have to consider how to make our homes and communities accessible to the disabled.

Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz, Electronic Café International, Santa Monica, CA

The Electronic Café International has 30 affiliates worldwide. Sherry talked about the process the children went through in communicating with other children around the world. She said American children communicated with Latvian children by drawing pictures over the computer. Then they started singing together and clapping.

Food is a transactional piece of information. Food is a way for different cultures to communicate. The Electronic Café International sponsors poetry forums and workshops. Sherry said the poets are really drawn to virtual reality.

Then Kit showed a video of some of the Café’s events. Not everyone in the communities they went into could type, so they used tablets that allowed for different character sets. Their intent was to record community memory by letting people record their own histories. They modified their system to keep track of pictorial as well as textual information.

People transmitted their images and created group artworks. People will do amazing things to use technology to bond. The Internet does not have enough bandwidth for real-time video, so they use other techniques. The video showed virtual musicians jamming with each other in nearly real time. This same technology is used for distance learning.

Kit said they have been working with children since 1984. Their group in California is doing T1 theater with children in New York. They co-authored music interactively on the screen and then played it live on MIDI in both locations. They are evolving into a multimedia theater. They are discovering what works in terms of people being together, working together and learning together in cyberspace.

You can dance with people in a virtual reality room and you can dance in their body, or through an avatar. People can be themselves or an idealized version of themselves. Constituencies may become communities, and communities change.

Someone from the audience pointed out that the musicians learn to adapt to time delays when jamming with other musicians remotely. (She had seen a performance at The Kitchen with the children at the Electronic Café.)

Amy said southwestern Ohio is more like West Virginia than the rest of Ohio. ACENET is an economic development project. Southwestern Ohio has a 32% poverty rate; 45% of high school graduates leave the area whether they want to or not because there are no jobs. To address their economic problems, they adapted a European approach to manufacturing and tried it in their area.

ACENET is about people, not technology. They are helping people do whatever they want to do. They work with 150 companies in the fields of specialty foods and specialty wood household products. They do three things with technology:

Amy discussed the Public Web Market. There are 26 producers in southwestern Ohio doing Internet marketing. Hawaii has a lot in common with southwestern Ohio. The producers are showing their products. Some businesses shouldn’t be on the Internet. For example, dense bread that is expensive to ship is not worth selling over the Internet. However, when the bakery went online, more local people started coming out to buy the bread.

Amy shared some success stories involving training and business incubation. People are learning how to market their sites and are exploring ways of becoming partners with purchasers. She discussed the success of the Department of Commerce’s Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP). People are learning to use community networks and are training other people. You can’t do everything online – you need bandwidth or space for conference calls or meetings to make decisions.

Amy concluded by saying we need to talk with each other about what we are learning in our community networks so we can all work together for economic justice.

Anitra belongs to and works with many organizations working with the poor and the homeless. Anitra, a former computer programmers, is also a formerly homeless person. She mentioned an organization called WEEL – Women’s Employment and Enforcement League. The Homeless Women’s Network grew out of WEEL to train homeless and low-income women to take advantage of cyberspace resources and get computer skills that will help them enter the job market.

People can access a computer and hunt down what they need. The Homeless Women’s Network publishes a newspaper that costs $.30 to produce and sells for $1, so the women get to keep $.70 of each paper. There are homeless newspapers all over the world.

It is important to teach people critical and analytical reading skills. Anitra said we need to put our own presence on the Internet and support the socially conscious sites. She said the Internet is a slush pile – the bad can drive out the good and the good can drive out the bad. So go get your won e-mail and web space and put yourself out there!

David said our notion of work is changing. The stages of work changes correspond to the changes in society. With each state different community principles are operant. He cited as an example Henry Ford’s mass-consumption mentality. Ford figured out that in order to mass market cars, his employees had to be able to afford them. Now people all over the world work to manufacture things they cannot afford.

The key to handling quality is to have a high level of quality arise spontaneously by workers, not coerced by management. We have to understand have technology affects both work and workers. High-tech businesses have high turnover rates – this is a real problem in expanding a high-tech business. The answer is to reinvent work virtually so that no one works alone any more.

We are moving back to a manufacturing environment with an elite at the top and masses of unskilled workers below. What’s wrong with the union local? How do we organize union spaces when the workers are virtual? We are present at the birth of a new way of doing work. We are co-creators of the future. We need to understand the new form of work. Here’s an illustrative quotation from David’s paper in the conference proceedings: "At a minimum, to be successful such trade unions would have to establish strong links with other progressive social movements, perhaps in coalitions regarding large civil technology projects or other consumer issues."

David gave an example from meat packing industry. Meat packing is highly automated. Workers stand around shielded in armor while carcasses move by on automated equipment, pretty much as they have for generations. However, trade unions have declined, production costs have declined, yet meat prices continue to rise. David’s conclusion is that:

Since work is a profoundly social activity, the design problem of cyberspace has become how to develop information systems that support workers’ social needs. David stressed that for such environments to work, information must be a truly shared resource, not something held by those with power. Here is an excerpt from David’s paper in the conference proceedings:

Ross said workers want work with dignity, meaning and community. Outsourcing is where people get laid off and then hired back to do the same work, only for another company. Ross is disturbed by the thought of a distributed workplace, with people working out of their homes.

Ross asked why we are not using the technology to solve the problem of technology eliminating jobs. We are just letting people get poorer. It would take 1% of Nike’s advertising budget to put its entire 12,000 person work force above the poverty level.

The Scandinavians design technology to help workers get the job done more easily, not to eliminate jobs. In other countries management sits down with both white collar and blue collar unions and determines things collectively. That doesn’t happen here. We need to engage in participatory design, and teach and stress the values involved therein.

Peter said community space and cyberspace have everything to do with each other. Discussing affinities between community networks, creating plans, organizing coalitions around technology and assisting homeless people with websites. We need centers to nourish, teach and support the use of cyber resources. When you study centers, you discover that community networks do not consist of wiring and cables, they consist of training and support. Neighborhoods are very important to the future of community networks, so we need to create effective public policies in community networking.

The Loka Institute charged 15 laypeople (seven women and eight men – three of whom were computer illiterate) with coming up with a list of projects for community networks. After two hours on the Internet, this group came up with the following questions:

Loka looks at science and technology. Those questions came from one weekend. The are planning a follow-up session. This work dispels the notion that laypeople aren’t qualified to deal with this issues – they are and they have.

Loka wants to implement the Danish model of citizen panels to collect input on such important issues as telecommunications policy, biotechnology, nuclear disarmament, etc. How do you get virtual dialogues without diminishing the quality of face-to-face social interaction?

Madeline reminded the audience of Howard Rheingold’s statement that above all we have to protect and safeguard our liberties. How well the Internet will serve us depends on us. We cannot let the commercial interests rule it.

Gary said the US is now the most unequal nation in the industrialized world and the most unequal in our nation’s history. He gave some examples of why this is happening.

Walmart is the most technologically sophisticated company in the world. It evaluates inventory by satellite every 24 hours and adjusts its prices accordingly. This has made it the largest employer, having driven Sears and K-Mart into bankruptcy. It also bankrupts everything else in the community and makes the community completely dependent on it. Now there are super Walmarts (in excess of 200,000 square feet) that consolidate the local Walmarts in a region. This means people have to drive farther to get what they need and their communities are even more economically devastated.

Walmart now uses its market power to dictate manufacturing, resulting in censorship of music and videos. Now we are creating a global hierarchy of values where consumer good are controlled from outside the community (malls with the same look and the same merchandise). The way to fight this is to keep goods and services circulating throughout the community.

How do we get money for equitable access to telecommunications? Here are some suggestions:

In California there was a $9 million settlement with Pacific Bell for overcharges. Instead of refunding $.10 to everyone, they opted to put the settlement money into a public interest fund.

Gary said we need to fight to increase TIIAP funding, because the program is working. We need to manage microcredit, because it does not pay the banks to. We must train people to be loan managers and account administrators. We have to figure out ways to get the people we want to reach involved in these issues.

Gary stressed that this process is taking place globally. The community network movement has the opportunity to be the counterweight to the apolitical libertarians on the Internet. We can craft a new kind of discourse by practical applications of technology, linked to each other. We are talking about the very nature of our economy.

Carol asked how do you get citizens voices back in the game? What does it really mean to take technology back and put it to work for society?

All of us live life on a continuum – on one end we feels secure, powerful and clear. ON the other end we feel inadequate, afraid, powerless and insecure. Your station in life determines where you move on the continuum.

Every single issue we face cannot be solved by the experts in that field. We need inter- and cross-disciplinary dialectic to solve our problems. Do we create a space in which experts and laypeople can work with the issues of citizens’ capacity to have power over their own destiny. We need to reflect on the issues affecting our society.

Then Carol asked us all to come up with an issue affecting everyone. The biggest one was the planet’s ecology. (After all, if we don’t save this planet, we are all dead.) Carol asked how many levels of social structure would have to change to implement that solution. We need to experience institutions as affirming our humanity, not disaffirming that. It is our right and responsibility to act to change it.

We need to make systemic changes. We are in a moment of history where individual consciousness taken collectively exceeds the capacity of our institutions to implement this consciousness.

There is a new wave of citizen activism that is amazing. People taking the initiative at the local level have given up on making changes at the national level. We have got to work on all levels at once. How do we take the local community dialogue and link it to regional, state and national levels. There is more support potential where there are community networks. The nonprofit community needs to form strategic alliances with government and business. We must all be aware of the other groups that are working toward the same ends. People in general are more connected to abstract communities based on interest than in communities based on geographic location.

Another challenge is the fact that there is no many-to-many communications capability on the Web. That is what it takes to create consensus and implement social change. How do we sue the Internet to change consciousness? We need to change the link between experts and citizens, as advocated by luminaries such as the late Richard Feynman, the Loka Institute and Edgar Cahn.

One of the major issues we need to focus on is the creation of public spaces. One of the dilemmas is that most communities don’t have large enough public spaces where citizens can meet to discuss common concerns. We need public spaces that allow all members of a community, regardless of socio-economic status. Unfortunately, poor people don’t feel comfortable where the rich people are, and vice versa.

We have to look at the messages we send our children about not trusting anything outside their small known world. We must embrace our diversity in order to solve these pressing social problems.

Aki talked about the Internet’s limitations by describing a project she is working on involving selling rings on the Internet. They presented their design to the client, what said "What about ring sizers?" You can’t do this on the Internet as you can with a piece of paper.

Then Aki closed by saying we must work with global organizations to be sure that rights are preserved worldwide.

James and Tara demonstrated a GIS (Geographic Information System) currently being developed at the University of Southern California School of Urban Planning and Development. James stressed that maintenance is a key issue in developing a system. Sometimes local business people knowledgeable in the technology will assist. If the community benefits, then it has value. The community needs to define the model for the system.

Lodis Rhodes said that in Austin people have been targeting the crack houses in poor neighborhoods, taking pictures and putting them up on the web. The next step is to find out who owns the houses, and to join forces with other neighborhoods in bringing lawsuits for public nuisance.

The USC GIS system uses the MapObjects database and does spatial queries, but it does not have the ability to analyze the data for such things as deciding where to put a supermarket. The system does have information on each business in the community. You can click on parts of the map to find out who is who in that block. Amy Borgstrom said that ACENet is using this technology to help battered women.

James closed by asking the question: How do you get businesses to buy in to community networking?

Lodis began by addressing the issue of equitable access. The LBJ School of Public Affairs has an NSF grant to do research on how to use networking for civic values and fostering community. They also have a TIIAP grant for education. The NSF grant studies how people respond to the technology once they’ve used it.

They are creating a database they hope will be maintained by the community. They don’t know what it will be used for, but it will be relational. Austin has an electronic publishing system which Lodis demonstrated with a template.

For each neighborhood there are at least three places to sign on. There is one access center for teaching and learning. One way to engage people is to let them see their neighborhood, to let them pick out landmarks they are familiar with. These kinds of systems must be made relevant as quickly as possible. Each map area takes you to another level that also has a map.

How do you define a neighborhood? Lodis says the people should decide what their neighborhoods are. Then he gave us a virtual tour of a neighborhood. There were people’s pictures with such information as their marital status, how long they have lived in the neighborhood, where they like to hang out in the neighborhood, etc. It is important to get the people from the neighborhood associations and other similar community groups into your system. The idea is to put up people who are active in the community. You have to go out in the community and find out who people are. Those people then talk about their neighborhood – where they shop, their favorite restaurants, what their kids like to do, what magazines they read, etc.

Lodis’ group wanted people to see themselves. They spent hours talking to people in order to draw out people in the community.

The empowerment center is a way to serve nonprofit organizations. You need to put businesses in for civic, not commercial, reasons. For example, barbershops and restaurants are not only places of business, they are also social spaces where people gather.

Jennifer said using graphics is the best way to get people involved with the system. Teens have the opportunity to be treated as equals by their peers. They help each other to learn.

Someone asked what their pitch is to get people involved. They emphasize community, and creating teams for maintaining community information. Lodis said they are now creating the demand and are getting people excited, but they have to be very careful not to promise things they can’t deliver. The site fosters communications between different neighborhoods.

Greenmaps are community maps generated to cover community ecology issues (e.g., incinerators, landfills, parks, etc.). Check out: http://www.Greenmap.com

Lodis said Austin’s politics are brutal. There are many pseudo-liberals who tell you your business and are skilled at stopping things. What’s exciting is to see people go through the learning curve. It is important to use pictures of different age groups to attract a wider range of participation.

Someone from the audience said there are teens with court-ordered community service (for mischief and misdemeanors) who are creating web sites for nonprofit organizations as part of their community service requirements.

Lorraine Pozzi, Mike Apgar (The Speakeasy Foundation), Anitra Freeman (Homeless Women’s Network), Dr. Wes Browning (former college professor and current Seattle homeless person)

First Anitra demonstrated a game that Wes co-developed with Tim Harris about being homeless called "Hobson’s Choice." It is a humorous but shockingly realistic model of what people actually go through in acknowledging that they are homeless, and figuring out what to do about it. The game also illustrates the horrors of governmental assistance programs’ bureaucracy.

Anitra pointed out that abused women are often fleeing across the country with nothing but their kids and the clothes on their back.

The speakers asked the audience to come up with ways homeless people can use the Internet. We came up with the following list:

Anitra said this year there will be an estimated 4 million homeless people in the US. She runs a writer’s workshop for the poor and the homeless.

A woman named Marilyn Chase said that homeless people have a lot to teach us. The Speakeasy’s homeless want to make their site a national model. (The Speakeasy is an Internet café in Seattle.) They hope groups like the Homeless Women’s Network will provide solutions to the problems to current equitable access problems.

The solutions are on-site training, putting computers and modems in the homeless shelters, and starting peer training in the shelters. There must be a peer atmosphere for people to learn effectively.

The Speakeasy is trying to start a homeless program through its nonprofit arm, The Speakeasy Foundation, to create RAIN sites. RAIN stands for Remote Access to the Internet.

Anitra pointed out that this country now has a 25% illiteracy rate. Increasing Internet use among the homeless is more important than in the general population, because you don’t need a telephone, voicemail or an address.

"Community Networks and Community Center-Based Technology Access: A Practical Guide to Developing Collaborations"

[NOTE: I never did figure out who was who in this workshop, so I can’t tell you who said what, but I can give you my notes.]

A person from CTCNet said there is a real connection between community networking and center-based access. CTCNet provides partnerships and programs, has members and sponsors conferences. They can provide any affiliate with unlimited site licenses for Lotus. They have an NSF grant. They are designed to work with community groups, not schools. They want the organization to be member run. For new projects, both staff and other members participate. Freenet and community network projects are joining CTCNet.

Sue from Austin Freenet spoke about partnerships. They went from $0 to $1 million and recruited 30 volunteers within two years, and they did it all through partnerships. Their Library Access Project put high-speed access lines, 70 computers and printers in 22 libraries within six months. One library gave them a room to be used for Freenet training. Students become teachers. You can check out the Austin Freenet at: http://www.austinfree.net .

Austin is working with a company that does multimedia development on the Web. The Web is a great place for children to show off the work they have done. Since most of their families do not have computers but do have VCRs, the kids can dump their creations to videotape and play it for their families at home.

City staff need access. The city needs an interactive website. Imagine being able to go to the Web to reserve a book at your library, or complain about your trash not being picked up! It’s the people without computers that can benefit the most from access. For example, poor people can’t take an hour off from work to wait on line at City Hall, but if they could surf into the city site and do what they needed to do they wouldn’t need to.

A person from an organization called Our Town said they started with a 4K RAM donated computer, which ran for three years. They built a collaboration with an ISP and got Internet access. Then they got free telephone lines from the county. In addition, the county gave space for servers. The ISP gave the county free Internet access. Now they have a public information network with school districts, arts councils, universities and local government.

The Mid-Columbia Network is a network of 11 libraries in three counties. The cities fight about how best to collaborate, wasting money hiring consultants to figure out how to work together. Then they put the study on the shelf and do nothing.

One example of a successful collaboration is taking county telephones, paid for with public money, that are not being used in the evening and use an automated switching system to make those lines live in the community centers. Another example of a successful partnership is a computer recycling project that was started with community development block grants.

Our Town runs Computer Learning Month to get children involved in community learning. You can visit the Computer Learning Foundation website at: http://www.clf.org .

All their volunteers started in 1991 running 22 computers in a community center. It started with two men bringing a computer into a community center.

In order to collaborate with corporations, you have to find an employee who’s an advocate and let the employee lobby for you internally. These centers serve first as access points for distributing information produced by others; then the community members start creating their own content.

CTCNet has many school collaborations, but schools are enormously difficult to negotiate with. Schools are saddled with massive bureaucracies and government regulations, as well as different unions’ rules, making the negotiation process slow, difficult and frustrating.

If you want to start a net or access center, you need to put something on for an event. Bring your own computer for four hours. Show the corporations your demo and ask for money. Be sure to document your success. Anthony added a word of caution here. Don’t wait until you have all the resources to get started – just get started and the resources will appear, if you have enough passion.

"Creating Sustainable Networks Through Partnerships of Commerce and Community"

In the UK the issues of equitable access and community networks are very similar to here. They are also into partnerships and collaborations. They have joint public and private economic development and community participation techniques. They have virtual towns in England. They are also struggling with the issues of social inclusion in the information society. How do we assure equal access to the information highway? What is required to make society inclusive? Technology by itself won’t make social inclusion happen, but it can help.

Community development is fundamental to most community networks. The pace is slow. People get driven by the rapid pace of technology. You cannot sustain a functioning community network without the support of the community. British Telecom’s focus is not on the disadvantaged – they want to replace the telephone systems.

Information capability is another critical issue. Too many people don’t have information handling skills. We have to teach people how to absorb increasingly massive amounts of information.

Doug Williams asked can we create a network that is used for all our commerce and our personal lives? A community communications network should be a community Intranet that is run, defined and possibly owned by a community. The telephone is a powerful network, but it is not technically challenging.