NETWORKS AND COMMUNITY : January 17, 1994 Networks and Community is devoted to encouraging LOCAL resource creation & GLOBAL resource sharing. compiler : Sam Sternberg samsam@vm1.yorku.ca This 3rd report of 1994 is the 9th weekly survey. Coverage includes ADMINISTRATION POLICY - DISCUSSIONS - NEW SERVICES FUNDING - TRENDS ------------------------------------------------------- ADMINISTRATION POLICY Evidence of the adminstation's interest in the community networking movement is mounting. --------------------------------- Vice-President Al Gore accepted an invitation from Dr. Avrum Bluming to dedicate the Los Angeles Free-Net in March. He did so in response to an invitation from the floor by Dr. Bluming at the National Information Infrastructure Summit at UCLA and before a national audience on C-SPAN.! -------------------------------- Tom Kalil, with the White House National Economic Council posted to the Communet listserve regarding Monday's adminstration announcement about the application process for the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community initiative. "After information on the initiative is on the Internet, I would like to know whether this mailing list would be willing to "brainstorm" on what role the NII could play in promoting the goals of the initiative. The Vice President has stated his interest in exploring this issue. After some period of time, the list could provide the Administration with an archive of the discussion and a summary of the points made." He made several suggestions for possible subjects: " Different empowerment zones could exchange information on their goals for community and economic revitalization. The gov't could streamline the applications process using EDI. Communities could use "civic networks" to make the process of planning and implementing community revitalization a more democratic one. Education and training programs could take advantage of the Internet or video servers. Local governments could use information technology to deliver services more efficiently ... Inspiring examples and pointers to people, information, resources would also be helpful. Potential roles for grassroots organizations, gov't at all levels, private sector, and just plain folks would be helpful." He went on to say " How do I know anyone will read and take seriously our proposals? I will personally commit to providing a summary of any ensuing discussion to the relevant people in the Administration. So, YOU ARE INVITED TO PARTICIPATE, I hope many of you will. -------------------------- The text of all recent speeches and background documents are available through the gopher server at : --> ace.esusda.gov choose 4. Americans Communicating Electronically/ 9. National Performance Review Information/ 9. Telecommunications Policy Reform Initiative/ FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: If you have questions concerning this service, please contact: almanac-admin@ace.esusda.gov (almanac administration) ------------------------------- DISCUSSION COMMUNET LISTSERV Gore's speeches are being discussed on Communet. The attitude is cautiously favorable. The administration seems to be slowing convincing many of the participants of its sincerity. -------------------------------------- The most interesting dissenting voice came from a posting of the following opinion piece. Reprinted from _The Chronicle of Higher Education_, vol. 40, no. 19 (12 January 1994), pp. B1-B2: Democratizing Technology By Richard E. Sclove The entire article was posted but this part impressed me most ........ " It's a beguiling vision, but it overlooks a major factor: democracy. Few citizens, workers, or communities are being consulted about technology decisions that their taxes will help support, decisions that will profoundly affect their lives. It _is_ possible to involve citizens in making technology policy. Last year, for example, a panel of ordinary Danish citizens spent several days hearing expert presentations on genetic manipulation in animal breeding. After cross-examining the experts and deliberating among themselves, the citizens decided that it would be "entirely unacceptable" to genetically ngineer new pets, but ethical to use such methods to develop a treatment for cancer. To organize this type of "consensus conference," the Danish government's Technology Board selects panels of citizens of varying backgrounds, and then publicizes their judgments through the news media, local debates, leaflets, and videos. Surveys show that the Danish public and politicians are better informed on issues addressed this way than are the citizens of other countries facing similar questions. During a recent briefing at the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, Norman Vig, a political scientist from Carleton College argued that consensus conferences represent a promising model for the United States to use to broaden the range of people who influence technological decisions. Universities could contribute substantially to democratizing technology if such a model were adopted--by helping citizen advisory panels analyze complex technical issues, by preparing "social impact" statements on technological proposals, and by creating community-research centers to help neighborhoods evaluate and influence alternative strategies for economic development. Government officials report that today just three groups dominate technology policy-making: the Pentagon and the national weapons laboratories, elite academic scientists, and business. The political scientist Philip Frankenfeld has called the resulting range of opinion "the sound of one wagon circling." Public interest groups, grass roots organizations, and ordinary citizens represent a negligible force." --------------------- A posting of a proposed new cable regulation policy from Washington State has generated considerable heated debate. It is intended to prevent monopoly control over local systems and mandate universal access. So far debate has divided along traditional lines - free the marketplace vs protect us against it. The legislation in its final form should benefit from the comments by an increased precision of focus and clarified expression of its intent. The one real benefit to most lurkers has been the posting of very precise data on the percentage of american households with phone service. ----------------------- A provocative posting on problems with the communet movement also generated a lot of comment. The poster suggested that most effort at building geographic communities was a waste of time. A few folks agreed but many respondents strongly disagreed. " And most computer people are not interested in geographic community. They use freenets as free (or cheap) on-ramps to the Internet. [ provocative poster ] " My personal experience contrasts with this. I *am* a Computer Person (sounds like the beginnings of a 12 step program). Virtual community appeals to me. I have made countless friends around the US and around e world, and have shared joy and sadness with them. I've gotten incredible advice and support from some of them, and others have raised my blood pressure to unimaginable levels. BUT ... although the WELL is not a community net in the sense of free or low cost access, I am growing a local, geographic community through the people I have met on this system. We have lunch. We go to each others houses. I trust them. They hire me. I fall in love with them. I see and touch them. Geographic, corporeal community supplements the virtual. And when I travel, the non-locals show me around, give me shelter, and enrich my life. The Internet is a big kick, but ultimately, it's boring. It's the people who are out there using it that make it interesting. The bottom line, I think, that computer-mediated communications works for enough people that our efforts are not wasted." The most interesting negative comment focused on the need to make civic nets easy to use if we expect most people to get involved. --------------------------- Another discussion focused on the question of subsidizing the community nets and the Internet. Again the usual position were taken, but the conclusion seemed to be that some form of subsidies were inevitable. The issue was really how to do an effective job of using the funding. -------------------------------------- NPTN LISTSERV Redefining NPTN is now its major task. 3 areas are being examined. I. ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES How should NPTN define itself as an organization? More specifically what are the key function(s) it should be playing over the next three years? II. COMMUNITY COMPUTING AND ECONOMICS How do we build a stable economic model that will support the development of both NPTN and each of the individual affiliate systems? III. NPTN AND POLITICAL ACTION Should NPTN take an active stance in the development of federal. state, and/or local legislation or regulation to promote the development of community computing? --------------------------- Nptn now has 108 affilated networks and organizing commities in 6 countries. All 6 countries - U.S., Canada, Finland, Germany, Sweden, and New Zealand - have operating networks. With more on the way. --------------------------- Academy 1 - Nptn's K-12 program was featured on a recent segment of the CNN special on the information Superhighway. Scripts can be viewed on the Well's gopher --> well.nkosi.sf.ca.us ---------------------------- Access for the disabled is made more difficult by graphical interfaces. Their voice synthesisers can't handle the "decoration". Discussion emphasised the need to continue text based access even as more graphical interfaces are introduced. ----------------------------- The system administrator at the Finland Free-Net site in Vaasa, Finland informed NPTN that they have changed their Internet address. If you have Vaasa on your teleport, please point it to: freeport.uwasa.fi Remember this is a change in the VAASA site NOT in the Helsinki site. ----------------------------- Several Free-nets shared news of funding successes. Including local alliances with T.V. stations and even army bases. ------------------------------ The collaborative project with the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment has begun; and the following five systems will run the "OTA Tele- forum" feature for the next three weeks: Buffalo Free-Net Cleveland Free-Net Denver Free-Net Tallahassee Free-Net Youngstown Free-Net Over the next five years the Social Security Administration (SSA) intends to spend about $1.1 billion on information systems procurement and modernization. Critics of SSA--most notably the General Accounting Office--say that SSA does not have a solid justification for this huge investment. That they have not shown that it will result in improved service delivery, or an improved work environment. To help settle this dispute both agencies turned to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to do a study of the issue. The OTA, in turn, has asked the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN) to set-up an electronic forum which would allow YOU to express your opinions on the matter. Here's how it works... When you enter the TeleForums you will be able to select any (or all) of four issues to comment upon. The issues have to do with: 1) SOCIAL SECURITY AND CUSTOMER INTERACTION 2) NETWORK ACCESS TO BENEFIT FILING SERVICES 3) DISTRIBUTION OF BENEFITS 4) YOUR GENERAL SATISFACTION WITH THE SSA You then choose the issue you want to examine and READ THE FILE CALLED "README." This file will contain a summary of the issue and the kind of things we would like the discussions to focus on. Each of these forums will be running simultaneously on NPTN affiliates. NEW SERVICES =============== KNOWBOTS HAVE APPEARED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA! A new command "the update command", enables users of the Library's MELVYL databases to create a search in a database to be run automatically on a weekly basis. As new records are added to the database, with the results are sent to the users e-mail address. This feature is often called "current awareness" or "selective dissemination of information" (SDI). It is a convenient way to stay current with recent journal articles on a particular topic, the work of a particular author, new books on a topic being cataloged for the UC collections, or the table of contents of selected journals. This command may be used in any MELVYL database except the PE (Periodical Titles) database. AUTOMATED VERONICA MENU BUILDER The use of veronica is estimated to be about 1,000,000 searches per month now. There are only a few well-known sites offering veronica access menus: Nevada, Minnesota, SUNET, NYSERNET, and a few others. These access menus are used pretty heavily. Steven Foster ( foster@nevada.edu ) has written a program which you may use to create a menu of active veronica servers within your gopher server menu. This program can be run frequently to ensure that the menu does not display veronica sites which are down for maintenance or unavailable because of network problems. Tentatively it is called "maltshop". Version 0.2 is now available. You can fetch the program by gopher or by ftp. By gopher: Path=0/veronica/maltshop-0.2 Host=veronica.scs.unr.edu Port=70 Type=0 by ftp: anonymous ftp to veronica.scs.unr.edu /veronica-code/menu-builder-0.2 ---------------------------- A PLACE TO ANNOUNCE NEW FREE SERVICES & SERVICE IMPROVEMENTS Richard W. Wiggins announced: comp.infosystems.announce "This is to formally announce the creation of a new Usenet group, comp.infosystems.announce. This news group was created to provide a single place where Internet information providers can announce newly-created and significantly-updated resources. The Call for Votes for creation of this group passed 574:2, which is believed to be a record ratio of Yes to No votes in a Usenet vote. The group is moderated. In keeping with the charter, postings should be announcements of new information resources, or new releases of Internet navigation/document delivery tools. Followup discussions should be carried out in other news groups in the comp.infosystems hierarchy, or other Usenet groups, or mailing lists, as appropriate. The initial moderator is Rich Wiggins, [ Wiggins has been a major contributor to the development of the Internet's cooperative spirit - ed ] He is the campus-wide information system coordinator at Michigan State University. Announcements to be posted should be sent via e-mail: infosys@msu.edu Administrivia should be sent to: infosys-request@msu.edu This is a Usenet News group, not a mailing list. Please do not send requests to subscribe to this news group. Please contact your Internet service provider for information on how to read Usenet News if you are not familiar with the options. If you might be able to offer a mailing list gateway please let Wiggins know at infosys-request@msu.edu. To keep this news group useful and manageable, please think of it as a place to announce new collections of information or significant new versions of tools. This news group is intended to primarily announce resources that are freely-available. By "resources" we mean documents or tools that exist today and are usable on the Internet. Announcements of conferences, seminars, new network consulting companies, new print magazines or books, etc. are best presented elsewhere. ------------------------------------- FREE OFFER PeaceNet World News Service (PWN) is a electronic mail delivered news publication covering either a specific area of the world or an issue of global importance. Each day, three to ten articles along with a table of contents is delivered to you as a single e-mail message. PeaceNet World News Service brings relevant news not found elsewhere. PeaceNet World News Service is a non-profit, non-commercial service dedicated to a free and balanced flow of multi-sourced news featuring first hand international news about the environment, human rights, development, the United Nations process, and the work of non-government organizations. The anchor of the PeaceNet World News Service is the Inter Press Service (IPS). IPS is ranked the world's fifth largest in terms of media clients. Virtually invisible in the United States, IPS aims to improve South->South and South->North news flows. While western news agencies tend to focus on political affairs, coups, crises and conflicts, IPS delivers news that is analytical and contextualized, newsthat stresses global interdependence. IPS's writers are all local people covering the areas in which they live. IPS articles appear three days after copyright. In addition to IPS, PWN includes sample articles from the PeaceNet and EcoNet computer networks. Sources include the Pacific News Service, the United Nation Information Centre, Third World Network Features and others. For a complete brochure with a signup form, prices and instructions on testing out the service e-mail to pwn-info@igc.apc.org. ---------------------------------- ANOTHER EFFORT TO MAKE GOPHER SYSTEMS EASIER TO USE "The William H. Welch Medical Library has released a new biomedical gopher, the Welch Medical Library Gopher. The team that has developed this gopher is taking a somewhat non-traditional approach to organizing its menus selecting a task organization. We would be very interested in hearing other developers thoughts about this design scheme. The idea is that users connecting to the gopher commonly have a task in mind. For instance they want to find research supporting resources, or they want to check up on the news, or they are looking for information on patient care. To accommodate this desire on the part of users we have created the following top level menu design. 1. Using this gopher server/ 2. Welch Medical Library resources and services/ 3. Basic science research resources/ 4. Caring for patients/ 5. Exploring the Internet/ 6. Finding people on the Internet/ 7. Funding resources/ 8. Health policy resources/ 9. Hopkins resources and services/ 10. Keeping up with the news/ 11. Scientific writing and publishing resources/ 12. Teaching, education, and course resources/ One consequence of this design is that many resources are useful for several tasks and thus there is a lot of redundancy in the resources listed. We have also had to point to resources relatively deeply embedded in other gopher servers. Merely pointing to the NIH gopher is not sufficient, with the funding menu we have to pinpoint the NIH funding information while we point to NIH patient care resources under our third menu option." We have undertaken this level of maintence complexity in the belief that we are adding a lot of value to these resources by adopting the task-based organizational scheme." It can be accessed by gophering to welchlink.welch.jhu.edu. Specific comments can be sent to Karla Hahn ----------------------------------------------- Statistics Canada is setting up a Gopher server with a WAIS search engine. The Gopher will be used to disseminate information about Statistics Canada, inform users on available reasources and provide users with information on ordering statistical services and products. They hope to make the Gopher a user drived service and will be requesting suggestions and ideas from the user community In addition, they will set up a LISTSERV. details will be supplied when available. I suggest anyone contacting them emphasise the need to place publicly funded statistical data on the gopher without charge. It is all to clear that that won't happen without lots of public demand. STATSCAN is a bastion of the popular Canadian government attitude - MAKE THEM PAY TWICE. EVENTS ============= The eighth annual Canadian Networking Conference will be held at the University of Saskatchewan at Saskatoon from June 21 to 23, 1994. Networking '94 is held under the auspices of the CA*net, CANARIE Associates, and NetNorth, and the regional networks across Canada. The Program Committee for Net'94 is seeking contributed papers for this year's conference. The theme of the conference is THE CANADIAN EXPERIENCE AND VISION Papers relating to the theme or topics of practical interest to the participants will be considered including: o CANARIE projects o New and interesting network-related applications o Network management tools and techniques o The Network as a tool - how networks enable new capabilities o User experience o Multimedia o Network servers and services o Supporting the Network User The program will also include updates on networking The presentation including any desired hand-outs must be submitted by May 31, 1994. Please direct other enquiries to: Heather Friesen - e-mail: Net94@Usask.ca ---------------------------- REPRESENTATIVE SAM COPPERSMITH announced a gopher server containing his position papers and press releases. The gopher also has connections to other governmental servers. To see it, point your gopher to Arizona State University. Once here, select "Arizona Statewide Information" from the first menu. Next select "U.S. Rep. Sam Coppersmith." Rep. Coppersmith may be the first Congressperson to offer such a service - they checked but did not find anyone else with one. He is also one of those first 12 members testing e-mail. In addition, he has a listserv based at ASU. When asked why do it, Coppersmith said: 1) It is useful as a learning tool to try out the Internet and see what's out there and; 2) It is a way to re-connect people with the government. congressman Coppersmith's email address is (samaz01@hr.house.gov) --------------------------------- Robert Brunwin de Jong, Wassenaar, The Netherlands wrote to inform us: " yesterday the City of Amsterdam introduced its "digital city" experiment. During the coming two or three months citizens from that city and, in fact, from all over the country, as long as they have a computer, communication software, a phone and a modem, can phone in, access local government officiers, politicians and documentation, and try the Internet. Some free entry terminals have been situated in some public places, and my evening newspaper tells me that the 20 special phone-lines are not enough at all and that people were queuing up all day. Most people do not succeed, they can not come thru because lines are engaged most of the time. The experiment was introduced by the deputy mayor of the city in a short celebration in which he sent a message to vice president Gore - fortunately nobody in the celebration room witnessed that, due to a typing error, the message bounced. It went OK the second time. We"ve not heard about Gore"s reply." ---------------------------- TRENDS The rate of organization of new civic network commities is growing. In Canada this week 2 new groups - unaffilated as of yet with any larger group like NPTN or Telecommunities Canada - made their existance know. One, HOMEnet, is focusing on several counties in South Central Ontario; another is located in Winnipeg Manitoba. ------------------------- The administration's leadership had lead to astonishing growth in the commitment of new resources for K-12 programs. The major announcement was from the announced alliance of Bell Atlantic Corporation and Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI). They promised the largest corporate program ever to link classrooms to the NII. Under the plan, known as the Basic Education Connection, the more than 26,000 elementary and secondary schools in areas served by the two companies ultimately will connect to the national information infrastructure. This represents about 25% of K-12 schools in the nation. Bell Atlantic/TCI said they will consult with local schools,education associations, higher education authorities, the Congress, government agencies, and other relevant authorities. They called upon those companies to provide their services at no charge to K-12 schools, as well. --------------------------------- Many of the listserves are showing a growing interest in multimedia or graphics interfaces. These new efforts look more likely to succeed than prior efforts at the introduction of protocals like NAPLPS. Why? Because they are based on collectively evolved standards that remain in the public domain. Among the growing list of prior failures - Bell Canada has applied to the CRTC to discontinue Alex (the videotext service). Bell claims lack of interest among customers and service providers (indeed, there are very few service providers left, and about the only thing running is the electronic white pages). Despite the fanfare of hi-res neato NAPLPS grafix, the gross commercialism of the service did not hold the public's imagination for long. --------------------------------- The public debate and industry response to administration efforts is not all favorable. The following two items reposted from the EDUCOM bi-weekly service are indications of the kind of obsticles that lie ahead. We must all be involved in education the general public on these issues. BASIC SERVICES ONLY, PLEASE. Consumer groups are pressuring government officials to ensure protection for people who only want basic telephone service from the high costs of tomorrow's electronic superhighway. The groups fear phone companies will raise rates paid by ordinary phone users to finance high-tech advancements benefiting mainly business and high-income customers. (Toronto Globe & Mail, 01/07/94 B2). BROAD OR NARROW? The Supreme Court is considering whether cable TV should be given the broad free-speech protection given to newspapers or the more narrow protection granted to broadcast TV and sales. Cable companies are arguing that the government is infringing on their rights by forcing them to local broadcast stations. (The Trenton Times 1/13/94 D1) ============================================== NETWORKS and COMMUNITY is a public service of FUTURE DATA; a partnership of researchers and research system designers. Our research resources include all commercial and non commercial nets, along with over 200 cd-rom databases, 50,000 magazines and more than 30 million books. For commercial services contact Gwyneth Store - circa@io.org This newsletter is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN and may be used as you see fit. To contribute items or enguire about this newsletter contact Sam Sternberg samsam@vm1.yorku.ca .