Designing Across Borders:
The Community Design of Community Networks

Position Paper

Carrie Rudman
U S WEST Advanced Technologies

Participatory Methods for Community Network Design

Background

Carrie Rudman has worked for Wang Laboratories and then U S WEST as a
user interface designer and field evaluator for multi-media
communication systems since 1982.  She was involved in the design and
introduction of voice mail, email, and multi-media mail systems to
large corporations in the 80s [1, 2].  This work contributed to the
content of a tutorial presented at CHI and CSCW entitled, Strategies
for encouraging adoption of group communication technologies.  She went
on to trial high bandwidth multimedia conferencing systems (over ATM
networks) with 20 distributed business and educational institutions in
the State of Oregon [3].  More recently, she directed an ethnographic
evaluation of the adoption of the Internet by the town of Winona
Minnesota [4,5].  Her team developed a conferencing environment used by
Winonas town leaders including the chamber of commerce, city council,
and local newspaper.  She later turned to evaluating communication
patterns in the home and their implications for low cost Internet
access devices.  Throughout her career, she has focused on
understanding the complex social dynamics that influence the success or
failure of team use of information and communication networks, and has
more recently focused on the meta-level dynamics of communities
including the relationships between government, business, educational
institutions, and home environments and their implications for network
design.

Position Overview

User participation is fundamental to the successful design and
introduction of community networks.  After all, the success of these
networks can only be measured by the community members it serves.  In
general, these networks are easy to access, they easily represent
multiple points of view, and they quickly evolve to support their
users.  Such networks can not help becoming, to some extent, organic
reflections of the communities that use them.  They promise to provide
more effective and efficient community problem solving and more fluid
social interactions.  But communities face a variety of pitfalls that
can have either temporary or long term negative impact on both the
users and managers of these technologies without active participation
of the users in the planning stages.  Among these are resistance by key
people, ineffective educational programs for new participants,
inefficient or unreliable access to information, invasion of privacy,
and unequal access driven by variation in the capabilities of users
equipment.

The positive benefits of these tools can be gained more quickly and
many of the potential problems lessened by designing and introducing
systems using a sophisticated understanding of group dynamics as well
as a highly tuned understanding of the individual groups history,
goals, and existing communication patterns.  This approach is
particularly important because of the inevitable juxtaposition of
multiple contingents in the same Internet index, web page or on-line
forum.  Educational institutions, businesses, government, volunteer
organizations, and family networks share the same playing field and
each influences and sometimes competes with the others goals.  The more
we understand these goals the better able we are to support them and
avoid conflicts.  Below are some strategies that I propose help design
more effective networks, accelerate their benefits, and ameliorate
their risks:

1. Engage multiple groups with interdependent agendas in identifying
initial systems and data requirements. Determine group goals and
constraints imposed by variations in system accessibility. Rapid
interviewing techniques can speed this process.

2. Determine current communication patterns and information use in the
community as a whole and for each interdependent group.  Assure the new
system design reduces the effort to communicate and adds communications
benefits beyond those available with preexisting systems. Identify
specific roles of existing communications media and key community
leaders and institutions and their patterns of use of those media, as
well as ingrained patterns of database use.

3. Assure the system design incorporates local, regional, national, and
international methods for disseminating information and supporting
on-going group efforts.  Provide sophisticated but easy -to-use indexes
to archived information and public and private forums, and support
personal communications between the various levels.

4.  Design systems that take into account the privacy needs of all
contingents and respect constraints on activities imposed by publicly
recorded laws, as well as tacit social agreements that may vary across
community contingents.

5.  Develop training to support specific needs of user groups.

6.  Work with users to establish effective roles and responsibilities.

Summary of relevant research

The approach recommended above was influenced by experiences with the
introduction of email, voice mail, and multimedia mail (the Freestyle
system) into large organizations [1, 2], and by studies of the use of
high bandwidth multimedia conferencing by distributed businesses and
educational institutions in Oregon [3].  The more recent studies of
community adoption outlined below show that many of the group dynamics
in business also hold sway in communities.

U S WEST ethnographic study of Internet adoption with Marita Franzke
and Anne McClard

The goals of this study [4,5] were to understand what factors
influenced the course of Internet adoption in the community of Winona
Minnesota in 1995.  A grassroots project was building a high bandwidth
network connecting the towns major institutions and opening a local
Internet Service Provider (ISP) for dial up access for the community.
We saw challenges that the community faced as they tried to understand
the opportunities provided by the Internet. We also saw logistical
challenges the community faced in providing access to the network,
defining information resources, and working out new roles and
responsibilities.  Every community installing a network faces a version
of these challenges.

Before the Internet was introduced, the existing communication media
used in the town included bulletin boards, flyers, newspapers, radio,
television, and varieties of informal means.  In the Spring of 1995,
the community members that we interviewed on the street, in restaurants
and bars, and in shops had heard of the Internet through local media,
but had never used it.  The web site at St. Marys University was one of
the few in the town. Winona State University was helping plan the
creation of the local ISP. Two large businesses hosted Web sites in
metropolitan areas outside of Winona.  As the technology matured, we
tracked barriers and catalysts of adoption. We interviewed the major
social institutions with high bandwidth connections into the network
(hospital, city hall, large businesses, colleges and schools) as well
as institutions with low bandwidth connections (e.g., chamber of
commerce, public library, senior center, and small businesses).

Unrealized visions. The larger institutions had the clearest visions
for the technology. Articles were published on how telemedicine would
enhance the hospitals ability to serve the health needs of rural
patients.  Having direct connectivity to the high bandwidth network did
not necessarily predispose organizational adoption of the technology,
nor did technical knowledge.  Visions from the hospital emanated from a
single technology champion but others were reticent about the Web and
the role it would play for them. Concerns about lack of security as
well as the expense of equipment stalled progress.  Although City Hall
had visions of how to use the Internet to facilitate community
involvement in city government, after a year they had not yet brought
their visions to light in part because of uneven distribution of
equipment and because city and county government was highly
interdependent and required substantial coordination.  One of the local
school systems had ambitious plans to connect all the students parents
to the Internet to increase parental involvement in the childrens
education.  While the board of directors was enthusiastic, some of the
administrators were wary of the impact such a program would have and
many teachers shied away from active participation.

Challenges defining data needs.  The town businesses and the schools
were some of the first to jump on the opportunity to access information
via the world wide web.  Some of the schools had difficulty locating
relevant educational resources as well as finding tools to support
teachers and students in creating their own web sites.  Local business
varied widely in their understanding of the opportunities afforded by
web sites, some providing very incomplete information, and few ready to
transact business via the web.

Incomplete training and consultation.  While large businesses could
depend on dedicated staff, both small businesses and families
attempting to sign on for dial-up service had significant difficulties
configuring their modems and software and had to disconnect to free up
their phone lines to get consulting.

Evolution to success.  Several successes began to drive increasing
participation on the network in the community.  The Winona Daily News
launched a successful on-line newspaper linking to a plethora of
community and regional information [6].  The Winona Senior Friendship
Center raised money for their computer lab. Local businesses donated to
the cause and City Hall helped make the lab a reality.  Seniors lined
up outside the door before the center opened to claim their spot at a
terminal, and membership at the center doubled in a short period.  Over
time, the synergy of efforts in the public, businesses, and the
educational sectors turned Winona into an active on-line community.
Businesses expected revenue and therefore invested not only in their
own systems but provided financial help to public institutions.
Schools disseminated access to the Internet into the families and thus
created an audience and active participants.
 U S WEST evaluation of Internet Conferencing by Community Leaders.
-with Pat Somers, Clarke Stevens, and John Meier

This project explored how Winonas community leaders in 1996 would
respond to trials of Internet collaboration technology integrated into
their now maturing Internet/Web environment. We provided them with
communication-rich Web sites to participate in real-time forums using
low bandwidth video conferencing, audio conference calls, shared white
boards, group synchronized tours of web pages, voting, and text chat.
They also used bulletin board discussion groups, document transfer, and
electronic mail.  We wanted to determine whether these groups would get
some of the same benefits that businesses received over broadband ATM
networks [3] and hoped to understand how social dynamics of the
community should influence the design of the tools and the content of
the sites.

We supplied the collaborative tools to the Chamber of Commerce, the
City Council, and the Winona Daily News on-line newspaper and
affiliated Home 101 radio station.  Their leaders agreed to champion
on-line meetings to complete their ongoing work.  The Chamber of
Commerce used the conferencing system to discuss upgrades to their
current web site. The on-line newspaper staff used it to explore
options for including interactive attractions in the newspaper site.
The City Council considered very carefully the possible uses of an
on-line forum.  Both public and private on-line meetings would have to
conform to ethics standards including assuring all public meetings were
announced in advance in various accepted venues and that any private
meetings didn't result in any thing that might appear to be hidden
collisions.  Ultimately, the local quality council used the system to
discuss issues of quality of life in the town, and their current topic
was education standards. They worked on developing a specific proposal
for the community.

Participants went to a Web page within their own web sites where public
and private meetings were listed. Privacy was critical for some
meetings but users did not seem bothered by having them listed in the
same place as public meetings.  Clicking on a meeting took users to a
web page designed by the community leader that automatically launched
the conferencing tools. Beside standard video conferencing, they used
video clips to introduce absent members to the team and video segments
from other meetings.  New uses of traditionally asynchronous tools
emerged including meeting planning in bulletin boards, agenda,
photograph, and documentation storage for "handouts" in the file
sharing tool, and chat for side conversations during audio meetings.
The participants identified key roles and responsibilities for meeting
management as well as for training the group on tool use. They all
participated in state-wide and national groups on similar topics using
overlapping materials already available on the Web.

Many of the challenges listed in the position statement above held sway
in this trial including needing to assure that vested parties were
involved, assuring that software supported their current use of
materials, dealing with variations in equipment and software, taking
advantage of regional to International resources, respecting privacy
needs, social constraints on activities, customizing training, and
establishing new roles and responsibilities across the project and
within the meetings themselves.

Desired Outcome of the Workshop:  I am interested in gaining insights
on how to actively support the development of community networks and
would like to be an active participant in a network of experts in the
topic to learn with them and contribute to future projects in
partnership.

 REFERENCES

1. Ehrlich, S.F.  Social and psychological factors influencing the
design of office communication systems.  In Human Factors in Computing
Systems, Proceedings of the CHI '87 Conference, April, Toronto.

2. Francik, E.P., Rudman,S.E., Cooper, D. and Levine.  Putting
innovation to work:  Adoption Strategies for Multimedia communication
systems.  Communications of the ACM, December 1991, Vol 34, No 12.

3. Rudman, C, Hertz, R, Marshall, C, Dykstra-Erikson, E.  Channel
Overload as a Driver for Adoption of Desktop Video for Distributed
Group Work.  In Video Mediated Communication, Ed A. Sellen, Lawrence
Earlbaum1997.

4. Franzke, M & McClard Anne, 1997.  Winona gets Wired:  Technical
Difficulties in the home. Commun. ACM 39, 12, 64-66.

5. Franzke, M, McClard, A, Rudman, C, and Somers, P Expanding human
factors to community research. .  In Proceedings of HFES, 1997

6. http://www.luminet.net/winnet/