History of Community Networking

7:00 Class

• catch up from last week

• amateur Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes)

  • hosted by computer hobbyists, starting in 1978
  • all costs absorbed by "sysop" (system operator)
  • smaller BBSes had only one modem and phone line connected, so chatting was impossible with anyone but the sysop
  • services offered in addition to CMC included software archives and multiplayer role-playing games
  • each BBS in a town had its own unique flavor and community spirit (even though the same bunch of people might use them all) until Fidonet homogenized conferences into newsgroups (in my experience)

• early community networks

  • Community Memory, Berkeley, CA founded in early 1970s with public terminals only: pay to post. All material local, contributed anonymously by users. System phased out several years later when demand declined.
  • Old Colorado City, first community-oriented BBS, founded 1980
  • St. Silicon's Hospital and Information Dispensary, Cleveland, OH founded 1984 to distribute medical information through public Q&A with doctors; later became Cleveland Free-Net
  • The WELL, San Francisco, CA, founded 1985, first community-oriented commercial online service

• Cleveland Free-Net (CFN)

  • founded in 1986 from St. Silicon's Hospital, which was an Apple ][ with a single modem, sponsored by Case Western Reserve University
  • CWRU wrote a new software package (FreePort) to run CFN on UNIX workstations, and later sold this software to other CNs.
  • 12 years later, CWRU still operates CFN, which has become the largest CN in the world.

• Big Sky Telegraph

  • in 1988, BST was the first organization to try the networking-communities approach to CNs
  • connected 40 rural schools and 12 rural libraries in Montana to each other and later the Internet.

• the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN)

  • CFN's founder left CWRU to found NPTN in 1989
  • NPTN's goal: help other cities start and maintain Free-Nets based on CFN's model
  • "the Blue Book" gave instructions on how to start a Free-Net from the grassroots level
  • NPTN served as a central, legitimate agency to channel major grants to local communities, sometimes even buying the hardware and software and delivering the Free-Net pre-configured to its destination
  • "cybercast" content included electronic mailing lists on Free-Net administration, teledemocracy, White House press releases, the TeleOlympics (in which athletes compare achievements via computer), and the Collaboratory (where students work together on science projects over the Internet)

• the WWW boom and civic networking

  • The World Wide Web was created in 1992, but it didn't catch on until the first graphical browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993
  • "civic networks" are community Web sites, generally sponsored by local government, allowing small businesses and nonprofit organizations to publicize themselves very inexpensively
  • analogy: if the Internet is like the Interstate Highway System, most Web sites are like truck stops or billboards, but civic networks attempt to be towns
  • some civic networks have CMC features like those of community networks

• wired communities

  • Blacksburg Electronic Village founded 1993 as a dial-up CN with some public terminals
  • Virginia Tech and the phone company helped bring ethernet networking into apartments, businesses, and homes, putting off-campus computers as directly on the Internet as those on campus
  • chain reaction: BEV's networking encourages more and more people to buy computers, which increases demand for more networking
  • less ambitious projects include Playing to Win and Plugged In, which wire community centers in disadvantaged areas into the Internet and provide classes and activities to the community

• money from heaven

  • National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA) announces its Telecommunication and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP) grants, 1994, funding many rural communities which had previously not been able to afford CNs
  • the California Department of Transportation creates the SmartCommunities project, 1995, to wire California suburbs in order to allow more telecommuting (and therefore less automobile traffic), using Davis Community Network and the City of Chula Vista as test sites

• NPTN collapses, November 1996

• Association for Community Networking (AFCN) founded, October 1997

  • AFCN includes many of the biggest movers & shakers in the CN movement in its board of directors, ensuring that it will become the US authority on CNs
  • AFCN was originally intended to be a worldwide organization, but Telecommunities Canada convinced it to limit its influence to the US

• Do CNs work? What do they do well? What don't they do well?

  • Clearly CNs are serving some members of the population, but are they the targeted members? Do they represent the community? Few CNs collect the demographic statistics necessary to answer these questions.
  • CN users say they feel a sense of community, but is it the same community that exists outside the CN? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
  • CMC will never replace some other forms of communication, but it can help encourage communication where there was little before
  • very few CNs have studied themselves sufficiently to prove that they do what they say they do

• CN Rule #2: Plan for evaluation!