This document was translated from English using Digital's Babelfish service. If you are fluent in one of these languages and would like to offer linguistic corrections, please let me know.
A community network is an electronic community center. It's America Online, only local, free of charge, and with public access points. It's public broadcasting where anybody can host a show at any time. It's a medium in which normally shy people can make friends, new residents can meet neighbors with common interests, and technophobes can lose their fear. It's a way to organize all the valuable information that communities generate but rarely communicate and to share the resources that never seem to be properly distributed.
This class will attempt to convey the excitement -- and the reality -- of the community networking movement through a minimum of lectures, a healthy dose of hands-on experience, and a semester-long, realistic simulation. All students will be supplied with electronic mail addresses if they do not already have them, and optional workshops will provide background technical knowledge.
Disclaimer: This course cannot hope to address the entire scope of the community networking movement. I will be relying to a large extent on my own experience, which means the class will focus primarily on the NPTN/Free-Net model of community networking, even though this is only one of the movement's many visions.
Class sessions will be held on Tuesdays from 7-8 PM, plus optional 8-9 PM workshops, in ARH 120 unless otherwise noted. If a class session ends early, we may move on to the next week's material, so keep that in mind if you're thinking of skipping class!
For each date on the syllabus below, there is a page of lecture notes covering both the 7:00 lecture and the 8:00 workshop. Suggested readings link either to the Web pages themselves or, in the case of reserve books, to the library catalog so you can see whether they're currently checked out.
A bibliography of relevant books and Web sites may be found at http://www.ofcn.org/whois/ben/CNclass/CNsites.html.