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The Network Observer Vol 01 No 08
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 8 AUGUST 1994
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This month: Liberals and libertarians in cyberspace
Networks and outsourcing
Community networking in Canada
A model for networks in community activism
Some really smart books
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Welcome to TNO 1(8).
This issue includes an article by Steve Miller, a CPSR activist
who has been involved for many years in community activism and
corporate philanthropy. He offers a solid vision of how NII
development can transcend the passive images of consumption and
manipulation that are implicit in the rhetoric of "500 channels"
and electronic plebiscites. Instead, he suggests, computer
networking can make its most powerful difference in helping
people to build their own community organizations. Networking
assists group activists and organization-building in numerous
ways. The important thing is training, both computer training in
a narrow sense and organizational training -- learning how to use
technology, and all of the other available resources, to build
organizations that empower people to take control over their own
lives, and communities to take control over their own futures.
This issue of TNO also includes a second article about computing
and communities, a report by Leslie Regan Shade -- whose article
on the slow start of the information infrastructure debate in
Canada in TNO 1(2), six whole months ago, already seems like
ancient history -- on the Canadian Community Networks Conference
and founding meeting of Telecommunities Canada, just finished
in Ottawa. Canadians are now building community networks at
an explosive rate, and Shade provides a helpful list of the
organizations and their movers.
Also included are a couple of brief articles by the editor. The
first discusses the future of US technology activism, in which
everyone will become much clearer about their basic political
stances, with the result that people with different political
views will have to spend more time exploring which issues they
can agree upon. The second article takes off from a Wall Street
Journal article about a networked legal research firm in order to
explore some ways in which information technology is being used
to restructure industries and change the nature of jobs.
Speaking of networks and communities, I'm the program chair
for the 1994 Annual Meeting of Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, which will be held the weekend of October 8th and
9th at UC San Diego. It'll be a terrific meeting and everyone
is invited to attend, whether you're a computer professional
or not. We'll have speakers from a wide variety of professions
(education, librarianship, public health, social work, law,
journalism, and museum curatorship, as well as computer people)
talking about the problems of getting information to people
and protecting the rights of privacy and intellectual freedom.
We'll also have a special emphasis on providing you with the
skills, connections, and tools that you'll need to do good deeds
and become an activist for democratic uses of technology on
Monday morning.
The Annual Meeting Web pages are now ready to go. Just aim
your Web client at http://www.cpsr.org/dox/am/program.html and
look around. Or, if you prefer, you can get the program and
registration information from an autoresponder by sending a
message that looks like this:
To: listserv@cpsr.org
Subject: anything
get cpsr/conferences cpsr-94.program
If all else fails, you can contact CPSR at cpsr@cpsr.org.
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The new politics of technology in the US.
It's time for people engaged in technology activism on the net,
at least within the United States, to realize that they're really
a coalition of two groups with different underlying philosophies,
progressives and libertarians. These two groups are not
homogenous or precisely defined, of course, but the growing
depth of ideological commitments among a variety of people
on the right has introduced a lot of frictions that should be
openly discussed. For example, at the most recent Conference on
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in Chicago, I saw several liberal
speakers unnecessarily piss off the libertarians in the audience
by presupposing that everyone in the audience agreed with their
own agenda, vocabulary, and values. The point isn't that the
two sides should agree about everything, since that won't happen.
The point is that they should work together when they can through
a conscious coalition, and then only disagree when they can't.
Both groups, as I say, embrace a fair amount of diversity. The
term "progressive" has enjoyed a new life in American politics
in the last few years, both because the right has thrown such
scorn upon "liberals" and as a reflection of the diversity of
the American left which was masked during the period of liberal
ascendancy in Washington. The progressive movement includes the
liberals, a largely middle-class movement with largely patrician
leadership, whose agenda focuses on the redistribution programs
and consumer and environmental regulations that arose in the
1960's and 1970's. It also includes a range of socialist views,
mostly democratic in nature, and a wide variety of populist
social movements from the labor movement to the community-based
environmental justice movement. It also may or may not include
the "communitarians", many of whose sentiments are found in the
community networking movement. What unites these movements is
the notion of political empowerment -- the idea that people's
interests lay in organizing themselves into specifically
political movements for redress of social grievances, whatever
their particular grievances might be. Although it is hard to
remember this now, the liberal Great Society programs at their
peak included extensive funding for actual community organizing
activities, a picture quite at odds with the right's caricature
of passive victims lining up for handouts.
Libertarians are also diverse. Many of them are part of the
still dominant wing of the Republican party. But many others
think of themselves as a third force in American politics,
distinct from both the established parties. (A handful of them,
having taken etiquette lessons from Rush Limbaugh, have engaged
in nasty and unscrupulous on-line red-baiting of organizations
such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But I'm talking
about the majority of decent, honorable ones.) The central
concept of libertarianism (and, again, I am referring to the
American usage of the term, which differs from that in most
other countries) is, of course, liberty -- a "liberty" conceived
in relation to the government. Libertarians tend to be strong
individualists who insist on their right to be left alone,
although libertarian intellectuals are starting to emphasize
voluntary associations whose role in society, they believe, was
displaced by the rise of the welfare state.
The technological issue upon which progressives and libertarians
have worked together most harmoniously has been privacy. Each
movement has its own pictures of oppressive invasions of personal
space that might be facilitated by technology. This alliance is
particularly natural when the possible invasions of privacy come
from the government, given progressives' collective memories of
government-sponsored pogroms against the left and libertarians'
generalized opposition to state power. The Clipper chip has
been a tremendously productive issue in this regard, since it
provides an extremely unusual alliance of everybody from the
ACLU to the captains of industry. It is not normal for industry
to be so clearly aligned against the preferences of the national
security state, and privacy activists should enjoy this while it
lasts.
What is surprising is how well the libertarian and progressive
sections of the privacy movement get along when it comes to
invasions of privacy by private organizations such as marketing
firms. After all, a thoroughgoing libertarian should oppose
government regulation of private entities and should not be
disposed to regret invasions of privacy by such entities,
except insofar as these invasions result from government actions
such as the sale of public records. Yet many libertarians, in
my experience, are really driven by an intuitive desire to be
left alone and by an intuitive opposition to large, established
authority, whether or not that authority is part of the state.
Although such views may seem contradictory, they are more natural
in the context of a larger view of technology and its place in
society that has been growing among the constituency of things
like Wired magazine. The focus here is on decentralization
and markets. Computer networks, it is held, are instruments
of liberty that allow people to communicate laterally, thereby
breaking down the hierarchies of governments and corporations
alike. The resulting vision is actually similar to that of Adam
Smith, who thought of the market as a vast network of artisans
and entrepreneurs and who had little or no inkling of the large,
bureaucratic corporation. Highly exaggerated tales about the
role of computer networks in the democracy movements in Russia
and China have become part of the folklore of this movement, and
a pervasive confusion has arisen between decentralized forms of
organization and decentralized distribution of power. The actual
evidence, such as it is, points largely in the other direction:
computer networks decentralize organization (in the sense of
operational decision-making) while simultaneously increasing the
power of corporate central management.
Be this as it may, little purpose is served by ignoring the
considerable philosophical differences that underlie coalitions
about issues like the Clipper chip. Indeed, exploration of these
differences will be important in extending political cooperation
to new realms, for example in building the community networking
movement, which will someday become big enough to have political
enemies who seek to stifle or digest it through regulation,
most likely under the guise of deregulation. On the other
hand, new conflict will most likely arise as each side explores
and develops its particular model for organizing people around
technology issues. Whereas each side has its own concept of
self-help and cooperative work, they have different ideas of the
purpose of such activities. For libertarians they are ends in
themselves, understood as ordinary expressions of liberty within
a framework of markets. For progressives, by contrast, they are
a prelude to political organizing; in particular, they provide
the experience in successful joint action and the skills of
organizing that are required to get a political movement going.
In this regard, I think it is valuable to investigate the often
tacit politics of a wide variety of emergent movements around
technology. I have mentioned the community networking movement,
which has extraordinary potential as both a political movement
in its own right and as an infrastructure for democratic activity
more generally. Another movement is the world of discourse
in MUD's and IRC and the like, in which individual and group
identities are explored and reconfigured on a daily basis in
incorporeal "places" and "spaces" whose construction routinely
encodes elaborate commentaries upon the places and spaces of the
rest of social life. Yet another is the explosion of affinity
groups organized around mailing lists, from people living with
a common illness to people sharing a particular professional
speciality.
What, in political terms, are these people doing? They often
do not conceive of themselves as engaging in a specifically
political movement, but that's alright. As emergent forms
of group activity and social imagination, they are inherently
political at some level, in some way. Most likely they are
internally diverse, in which case we can set about articulating
points of agreement and disagreement, shaping agendas that afford
shared action, and get about the hard work of building democracy.
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Outsourcing and you.
A recent Wall Street Journal article nicely illustrates the
risks and benefits that come from the use of computer networks
to create distributed labor markets:
Amy Stevens, A lean network of researchers poses a threat to
law firm fat, Wall Street Journal, 8 July 1994, pages B1, B6.
It's about a new company called Legal Research Network that
contracts with law firms case-by-case to conduct customized legal
research. The law firm sends LRN the facts and questions, and
LRN passes them along to one of its network of lawyers, who then
agrees to do the job for a fixed fee. As an economic matter,
LRN makes sense because, having a large "stable" of researchers
available, it can frequently match up incoming jobs with lawyers
who have specifically relevant backgrounds. For a firm to do all
of its research in-house, by contrast, it must frequently assign
research to lawyers with little relevant background. LRN can
thus do the job much more efficiently, which means that they can
pay more and charge less.
What makes this scheme work? One relevant analysis is available
in this paper:
Eric K. Clemons, Information technology and the boundary
of the firm: Who wins, who loses, and who has to change, in
Stephen P. Bradley, Jerry A. Hausman, and Richard L. Nolan,
eds, Globalization, Technology, and Competition: The Fusion of
Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s, Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 1993.
Clemons argues that this sort of thing works when the service
in question being provided is complex, scale-intensive, and
detachable. Legal research is clearly complex; it would be
impossible to perform on an assembly line, and it benefits from
specialization. It is scale-intensive in that LRN can obtain
economies of scale by routinizing front-office operations,
maintaining and exploiting a library of previous research
products, and having a large roster of specialized workers
available. And it is detachable because it is information-work
whose inputs and outputs can be transmitted across great
distances over computer networks, provided the facts of the case
are not too complicated or subtle to communicate reliably to a
distant and unfamiliar contractor.
Structures like this are arising for many reasons in addition to
technology. The specific role of computer networks is to make
a nation-wide network of researchers all effectively equidistant
from headquarters. These researchers are all working part-time,
being paid by the job. They accept the work for the same reasons
as other part-time workers: they are unemployed, on maternity
leave, retired, or otherwise unwilling or unable to take
full-time work. A system like LRN's is thus genuinely a good
deal for many people. Moreover, by making legal work cheaper, it
may increase ordinary people's access to the courts and decrease
the burden of litigation costs on the economy.
The problem arises when such systems become entrenched in the
structure of the industry. The reason why employers give people
full-time, long-term jobs is that it is cheaper than hiring
people on the spot labor market to perform each separate task.
Employing people full-time can be cheaper for many reasons,
including the costs of finding and hiring suitable employees and
the amount of specific knowledge and training that are required
to perform that company's tasks. Many things can change the
economic balance in favor of temporary labor, including changes
in the structure of work tasks that make them more detachable
than before. Computer networks make legal research tasks
more detachable by decreasing the costs of communicating those
tasks to an outside contractor. Other computer technologies can
reduce the costs of hiring by automating parts of the interview
and background-check process and through economies of scale in
record-keeping; thus the growth in the routine use of temporary
labor contracted through firms like Manpower:
Robert L. Rose, Thriving Manpower mixes hiring, hamburger
wisdom, Wall Street Journal, 24 June 1994, page B4.
In any case, the shift toward temporary labor has profound
consequences for people's lives. A full-time job isn't a
totally guaranteed meal ticket, but it does provide a measure
of stability that is important for anybody who has anything else
going on in their lives, like raising children. Temp work is
convenient when it's what you want, but it's a terrible life when
it isn't.
More important than that, the creation of efficient labor markets
pushes down wages. For example, it's hard to live on what you
can make through temp-work telemarketing. The good money will
go to people with specific skills, but only so long as those
particular skills are in demand. The situation is even worse in
information-work, since the temporary employer can keep a library
of work products to decrease the amount of work required next
time. LRN does this, and promises to pay "residuals" when the
work is reused. But there's nothing written in stone about this
arrangement, which may or may not be demanded by the structure of
the market.
Another potential difficulty is the effect of piecework-based
outsourcing on career ladders. The "fat" spoken of in the title
of the WSJ article on LRN consists of junior attorneys. Doing
legal research for the senior attorneys' cases is a prime example
of apprenticeship, the way an apprentice carpenter might start
out by sweeping the floor and sharpening tools. Research gives a
new attorney some exposure to a wide variety of legal issues and
cases, as well as occasions for informal interactions with senior
attorneys and clients. If legal research is heavily outsourced
then it will become much harder for junior attorneys to rise
without special background and connections. This snapping of
the middle links in the vocational hierarchy is found virtually
anywhere high technology is used to differentiate and specialize
work tasks, and it is probably one important contributor to the
growing divergence (at least in the United States) between the
prosperous and the left-behind.
In short, as I said in a review of Bradley et al in Wired, we
might be looking at a future in which everyone on the planet
is competing with everyone else in real time. Is this a happy
planet? Is it really an efficient planet despite its ceaseless
upheaval, given that people will still be trying to raise kids?
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Conference Report: Canadian Community Networks Conference and
founding meeting of Telecommunities Canada, August 15-17, 1994
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario.
Leslie Regan Shade
McGill University
Graduate Program in Communications
shade@ice.cc.mcgill.ca or shade@well.com
The second annual Community Networking Conference switched
its focus from international perspectives to those affecting
the Canadian arena. It's wonderful to realize how mobilized
community networks and various public interest groups have become
in the last twelve months. Last year, there were two free-nets
operational in Canada (the Victoria Freenet and the NCF-National
Capital Free-Net in Ottawa) and approximately a dozen in the
planning stages; this year, two more free-nets (CIAO in Trail,
B.C., and the Chebucto Free-Net in Halifax, N.S.) have started
up, at least two are due to become operational in 1994 (including
Vancouver and Toronto), and over 40 are in the planning
stages. Last summer there weren't any organizations devoted
to exploring issues surrounding the public interest in the
information infrastructure; this year (perhaps inspired by the
formation of the federal Information Highway Advisory Council,
and "Information Super-Hypeway" conferences that have stressed
business and industry concerns over public interest concerns),
at least two groups have started up. These include the Coalition
for Public Information-CPI-and the Public Advisory Council on
Information Highway Policy, founded by Marita Moll and Sean Yerxa
of Ottawa.
Conference presenters and informal chats focused on getting the
needs of the public out to the policymakers. Keynote speaker
Mark Surman in his talk "Social activism and the electronic
commons: from community television to freenets" set much of the
tone of the conference by challenging participants to set the
agenda for principles that will inevitably define electronic
public spaces, including: 1) free and open access; 2) a two way
flow of information; 3) access to computer and technological
literacy; 4) non-commercial spaces; and 5) funded by the people
who own the network system.
The conference's goals were also to share the experiences of
those involved in setting up free-nets; raise awareness about
the purposes and possibilities of free-nets; provide for the
founding meeting of Telecommunities Canada; and prepare an issues
agenda about the role of community based free-nets in Canada's
information infrastructure.
Working/Discussion Groups centred on these and other issues,
including the definition and role of free-nets, fundraising
practices, future directions in community network technologies,
francophones and free-nets, and the role of Telecommunities
Canada.
Panels included free-net research on use and demographics with
Al Black talking about the CRC survey of NCF freenet users; Kees
Schalken of Tilburg University on Amsterdam's "Digital City"; and
my talk on the E-Connections project, whose goal is to examine
the possibility of setting up networking services for non-profit
and labour groups in Ontario.
The panel, "Partnerships in Public Access" included Rory McGreal
of TeleEducation, New Brunswick, on the Information Highway
Advisory Council's Subcommittee on Learning and Training; Karen
Kostaszek on the relationship between SchoolNet and the freenets;
and Lynda Williams on the relationship between rural access,
public libraries, and free-nets.
The Community Nets Software panel examined the various directions
free-net software is heading, and included demonstrations
by David Trueman of Chebucto Free-Net; Greg Searle of the
Telecommunity Development Group in Guelph on FreeSpace, and Ian
Duncan on technical choices for networked community activities.
The fourth day of the conference was devoted to electing the
board of directors for Telecommunities Canada, the national group
to represent Canada's free-nets. The new board includes:
Michael Gillespie - Vice President of Blue Sky Freenet
Roger Hart - Senior Consultant, Teleconsult Limited, Victoria BC
Andre Laurendeau - Le Reseau Electronique du Montreal
Metropolitain
Kevin Nugent - Chebucto Freenet, Halifax
Gareth Shearman - President of BC Freenet Association
David Sutherland - President of National Capital Freenet Inc.
Lynda Williams - President of Prince George Freenet Association
Issues that TC will investigate include: promoting and fostering
the Canadian free-net movement; representing freenets on national
and international levels, including drafting a response to the
Advisory Council; creation of a mission statement; working on
establishing freenets as charities; obtaining lower Internet
access from providers; and promoting on-line public literacy.
As David Johnston, head of the Advisory Council said to
delegates at Monday's dinner, "Canada needs your enthusiasm,
your understanding of the issues, your expertise and your
participation to make the Information Highway a reality and
ensure that it benefits all Canadians". The challenge is now
ours; and judging from the enthusiasm and vitality at this
year's conference, the public interest in Canada's information
infrastructure is strong!
For those of you who couldn't make it to Ottawa this month,
an extensive archive of conference material exists on the NCF
Conference Submenu.gopher (menu item 17: Canadian Community
Networks Conference, 1994...). This includes the excellent
Realtime Online Professional Conference Reporting Team (headed
up by Rosaleen Dickson); several conference papers (including
the following: _From VTR to Cyberspace:...The Electronic
Commons_ (Mark Surman); _Technical Choices for Networked
Community Activities_ (Ian Duncan): _The Digital City _(Kees
Schalken/Pieter Tops); and _E-Connections: Investigating E-Mail
for Ontario Non- Profits_ (L. Shade); conference agendas;
Telecommunities Canada Issues and Proposed By-Laws; Canadian
Community Nets status reports; and access to the Usenet newsgroup
culist.can-freenet.
Canadian Community Networks Conference, 1994 (menu)
1 About the Conference
2 Discussion >>>
3 Draft Conference Agenda
4 Directory of Canadian Community Networks (long)
5 Telecommunities Canada Issues...
6 Proposed By-laws for Telecommunities Canada
7 Community Nets Status Reports...
8 Access to Usenet Newsgroup : culist.can-freenet >>>
9 Conference Papers...
10 Realtime Online (Reports/Working/Discussion Groups)...
11 En direct - d'heure en heure...
The views in this conference report are inevitably mine...
Here is a message from Garth Graham <aa127@freenet.carleton.ca>
about the conference gopher:
The site established on National Capital FreeNet (NCF) to report
this conference is building rapidly. A team of conference
recorders are posting summary descriptions (both English and
French) of each session within a short time after it finishes,
and the texts of most conference papers are following. For
registered members of NCF, this site is at the bottom of the
main menu as "Canadian Community Networks Conference, 1994."
For nonmember, NCf can be reached via freenet.carleton.ca.
(login: guest). It's also accessible via gopher and WWW.
The URL for the WWW server is http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/
The FreePort based menu is at:
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/freeport/freenet/conference2/menu
The Gopher URL is: gopher://freenet.carleton.ca/11/ncf/conference2
By gopher directly, follow to:
Carleton University Gopher
|National Capital FreeNet Gopher
|National Capital FreeNet (NCF) info by gopher
|Canadian Community Networks Conference, 1994
The site also contains background policy documents related to
the founding meeting of Telecommunities Canada, status reports
from community network and Free-Net associations, and a detailed
directory of Free-Nets and community network organizations in
Canada.
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Building the NII from the bottom up:
A strategy for working through local organizations.
Steven E. Miller
CPSR National Board
smiller@mecn.mass.edu
By definition, an infrastructure is something that lays the
foundation for something else. The coming National Information
Infrastructure (NII) will lay the foundation for -- and thereby
help shape -- new forms of production, consumption, culture,
social interaction, and citizenship. The kind of future the NII
helps shape depends, in part, on the visions it is intended to
achieve and the strategies used to implement those goals.
Industry spokespeople describe the NII as a vehicle for movies
on demand, home shopping, and sit-com reruns, with the "serious"
content provided by endless infomercials. Clinton Administration
liberals stress the NII's educational importance of allowing
access to endless information, as well as its potential to spur
private sector economic development. Many cybernauts are most
enthused about the creation of virtual communities and the coming
together of the global village.
But for those of us whose pleasure in the technology is matched
by a growing concern about the tendency of the NII to further
divide our society (and the world) into "haves" and "have
nots," these visions -- and the NII implementation strategies
they imply -- are woefully inadequate. To those of us who see
the NII as a critical tool for the revitalization of democracy,
the strengthening of neighborhoods, the release of grass-roots
cultural creativity, and the revival of mutual aid, these visions
are a painful warning of opportunities we hope are not yet lost.
These visions fail because they won't lead to the achievement of
universal service in a meaningful way. While an estimated third
of American homes have a computer, only about 3% are regularly
online. In fact, as a result of price increases caused by
deregulation, a growing number of Americans -- up to 20% of some
low-income communities -- don't even have home telephones. Even
if the "NII access device" of the future is built into TV sets,
cable set-top boxes, video game controllers, or other "everyday"
devices, and even if they eventually drop in price, it will be
a long time before the entire population will be able to afford
them -- if ever. In addition, no matter how friendly computers
get, they will still require some level of skill and expertise.
In a nation which has a 40% high school drop out rate, a 20%
adult illiteracy rate, a permanently unemployed underclass, and
a segmented labor market that tracks a significant proportion of
the working population into dead-end, unskilled, and short-term
jobs -- it is likely that many people will never get taught the
skills needed to do more than the most basic types of (probably
consumption oriented) activities. Social transformation requires
social participation, and a totally market-driven NII is not
likely to achieve it.
Second, these visions fail because they are too focused on
individuals. For all the importance of individual responsibility
and effort, societal power (political, economic, and cultural)
overwhelmingly operates through institutions. Individual
empowerment can lead to upward mobility. But the "trickling up"
of particular people doesn't change the structural hierarchies
and inequalities of our society. Social justice, the provision
of the basic necessities of life for everyone, the inclusion of
all groups in a democratic governing process -- all these require
the poor and powerless to aggregate their individual efforts into
organizations and collective campaigns.
AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY
These criticisms of the most common visions of NII implementation
imply another approach: combining NII deployment with local
organizational development. And not just any organizations,
but specifically those that serve, advocate for, and are run
by people from the parts of our society that are least likely
to be able to buy their way into a market-driven NII that
rations access according to personal income. In this context,
people who are creating civic networks as a way of anchoring NII
development in the needs and realities of local communities must
go beyond making their facilities available to large numbers of
individuals, even if those individuals are low-income, non-white,
non-English speaking, or any of the other politically correct
categories. We need to adopt a strategy of working through and
with grassroots organizations.
An organizational strategy has many advantages. Organizations
usually have greater financial resources than individuals,
particularly low-income people. Non-profit organizations are
much more capable than individuals of soliciting donations
or applying for grants to pay for a couple of computers and
modems. In fact, most Internet users already get supplied with
equipment and access through organizations -- universities and
corporations. To include other populations, we need to work
through the organizations that impact their lives.
But simply having the equipment is not enough. Few of us
learned all we know by ourselves. When we go to a library, we
start by asking the librarian for help. In terms of computers,
most of us learned from others at our schools or workplaces. We
all need intermediaries to get us started and support us through
the inevitable problems of learning to enter and wander through
cyberspace. Local organizations can provide the vital connection
between ordinary people and the on-line universe.
Organizations are multipliers. Training individuals helps
individuals. Training people in an organization means that
the skills are likely to be passed on to others, and that
the community will retain an institutional capability even as
individuals pass in and out of activity.
Working through local organizations also makes it easier to
connect to people. Instead of trying to convince people to come
to the network, the network goes to where the people are already
being gathered together to serve their own needs. These are the
groups that are already fighting to empower their members, it
will be no small accomplishment if we can help them finds ways to
use telecommunications to increase their chances of success. The
strengthening and success of local citizen's groups, self-help
neighborhood associations, locally run service agencies, and
other community-based organizations is crucial to any larger
strategy for increased equality and justice in our world, of
which preventing the creation of "information haves and have
nots" is just one aspect.
Rooting cyberspace in the social realities of neighborhood
organizations increases the odds that the needs and priorities
of those "have not" areas will be effectively aggregated and
expressed. If we want to impact NII policy, we have to build
a grassroots base as well as advocate at the federal level.
Washington-based public interest advocacy is vitally important.
But it is only one part of the picture. Local understanding of
the issues based on concrete efforts to use telecommunications
for community improvement is just as important, perhaps in some
ways even more important. This is another way that organizations
multiply individual impact.
TECHNOLOGY HELPS ORGANIZATIONS
People support or join groups because membership brings some
amount of personal benefits such as learning new skills, access
to resources, exposure to a broader world, getting useful
services, etc.; because the group provides a way to be connected
with other people who share similar interests; and because they
see the group as an effective vehicle for dealing with personal
or societal problems.
Technology can help organizations attract and keep loyal
members, a vital ingredient for success. The value of membership
increases if organizations are the vehicle for computer skills
training and for access to the world of on-line resources.
At the same time, local organizations will be better than some
central group at recruiting network users from a broad range of
the population.
Technology also makes groups more effective. Internally, groups
can use word processing to create funding proposals, write
reports and petitions about important issues, create membership
letters and other materials, prepare newsletters and flyers,
and more. Databases are vital for keeping membership lists and
addresses, tracking contributions, client tracking, etc. And
financial software for bookkeeping and fund accounting helps with
one of the biggest headaches in the non-profit world.
Externally, telecomputing allows organizations to gather data
on funding opportunities, on issues they address, and on the
population they serve. It allows them to more easily communicate
with their peers in other organizations to share experiences
and build coalitions. It allows them to gain greater exposure
and establish increased credibility by participating in national
forums and acting as "issue experts" for community networks.
In this sense, local groups act as "information providers"
rather than as information consumers -- exactly the kind of
bottom-up activism that will be needed if the NII is more than
an overwhelming and hegemonic waterfall of top-down data flow.
Networks augment the ability of those who already know about
and talk with each other offline to share large amounts of
information over greater distances with less concern about "real
time" coordination. Broad based local and national networks
help bring together those who share similar interests, or could
simply be helpful to each other, but whose paths do not otherwise
cross. In this way, people and groups can join with others who
are "like us."
IMPLICATIONS FOR COMMUNITY NETWORKS
An organizational strategy has important implications for
creating community networks. While most local network organizers
are already doing some of these activities, the absence of an
explicit strategy has forced many of them to discover these ideas
on their own and hindered fully effective sharing of experience.
First, it implies that the first step in creating a local network
is talking to local neighborhood leaders and building a coalition
of local community groups. These groups should be treated as
full partners in the design process rather than as clients to be
served.
Since few of these groups will have enormous resources or
technical expertise, this process also requires a deep commitment
to some type of participatory design approach. A successful
PD effort needs a combination of talking about general needs
and opportunities to use and comment upon functional models.
Here, in fact, is where the technically knowledgeable people in
the group play a key role, iteratively creating prototypes and
then incorporating insights from group critiques. In this way
technically sophisticated people can help non-techies understand
the general possibilities of available technology so that the
newcomers can inject their specific needs and realities into
the design. Without working prototypes, group discussions can
get lost in galactic visions beyond local capabilities. Without
group input, technical development can easily forget that it is
only the vehicle for achieving other goals.
Local groups should be seen as a primary vehicle for public
access, equally or even more important than libraries, city hall,
and shopping malls. But, more importantly, network organizers
should welcome, rather than feel unease, about the inevitable
tendency of local groups to see the network as a vehicle for
serving their own organizational needs. The success of the local
groups is the success of the network, even though it will often
feel as if there is a tension between the two.
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This month's recommendations.
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making
of the American Working Class, London: Verso, 1991. A brilliant
and absorbing history of "whiteness" as a shifting category in
the nineteenth century United States. It was not always clear,
for example, whether the Irish were "white". As white working
people lost their autonomy in the emerging industrial system,
they could console themselves with the thought that at least they
weren't black, all the while engaged in complicatedly ambivalent
relationship with black people, from blackface minstrelsy to
street riots. Roediger analyzes all of this with great subtlety
and sophistication.
Deborah Schiffrin, ed, Meaning, Form, and Use in Context:
Linguistic Applications, Washington: Georgetown University Press,
1984. A relentlessly intelligent set of papers about rethinking
linguistics as the study of what people *do* with language, not
just the impersonal structures of language. Despite being ten
years old by now, this collection has aged little in its vision.
Jenny Cook-Gumperz, William A. Corsaro, and Jurgen Streeck, eds,
Children's Worlds and Children's Language, Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1986. Another relentlessly intelligent set of papers,
this one about children's acquisition of language. The idea,
once again, is that language is something that people *do*, and
that linguistic practice is inseparable from the rest of what
goes on in children's lives. In particular, these articles focus
on children's worlds, that is, the complicated and interesting
worlds that children make on their own, independent of grown-ups.
Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing
Industries and Competitors, New York: Free Press, 1980. This
book about the analysis of competitive situations in particular
industries has been deeply influential among business people
in the nearly fifteen years since it was published. It is
certainly a more satisfying view of markets than the simple,
generic view of traditional economists. Every industry has its
own barriers to entry, and each firm has (or had better have)
its own well-defined competitive strategy. He says that the
three generic strategies are price leadership, differentiation,
and focus on specialized markets, although this distinction is
starting to break down in markets in which rapid change is the
norm. He provides a set of concepts for analyzing competitors.
In large part this is just a matter of assembling every concept
that might be useful, but the effect in total is more impressive
than that sounds because one gets a sense of completeness. One
can, for example, work up case studies within this vocabulary and
make comparisons between different industries. He provides ways
of predicting the evolution of an industry, based in part on a
"life cycle" (maturity, etc).
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
Audio Adventures
1445 Pearl Street
Boulder, Colorado 80302
phone: 1 (800) 551-6692 (in the US)
What a cool idea. Audio Adventures isn't a computer company, but
maybe someday it will be. What it does today is rent out books
on tape to people traveling on American highways. They have
shops in about 150 truck stops coast to coast. Pick up a tape at
one truck stop, drive down the road listening to it, and return
it at another. And they have real books too, not just formulaic
thrillers.
Write or call for Audio Adventures' brochure. But only if you're
really interested -- don't just harass them. Thanks a lot.
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Follow-up.
Arun Mehta <amehta@doe.ernet.in>, who wrote an article about
networks and international organizations in TNO 1(5), kindly
pointed out to me that my article entitled "Privacy and
computer-mediated activity" in TNO 1(7) referred to the United
States obliquely as "this country". Although I had not thought
about it before, this expression tends to presuppose that the
author and reader are in the same country, which is obviously
not a valid presupposition on the Internet. This set me to
thinking about the wide variety of ways in which Americans
(and, for all I know, citizens of other countries as well) tend
to treat their own country as if it were the whole world. For
example, if someone says "50,000 people died in auto accidents
last year", that means that 50,000 people died in auto accidents
in the United States, not in the whole world. If you want your
statistic to refer to the whole world, you generally have to
say "in the world" unless the context clearly provides otherwise.
In writing my article about "The new politics of technology in
the US" in this issue of TNO, I kept failing to find natural ways
of saying, "This article is only about the US because that's the
only country whose technology-politics I know well." Even the
title, with its clumsy "in the US" tacked on, doesn't scan very
well. Part of the reason for that article being specific to the
US, of course, is that the political traditions of the United
States have been historically fairly isolated from those of the
rest of the world, so that (I am told) words like "libertarian"
mean very different things elsewhere. Perhaps this will change
as political issues globalize along with everything else, or
perhaps it will change in some other way as the United States
experiences a new wave of nationalist reaction. We shall see.
You can now reach the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's useful
gopher directly at gopher.acusd.edu. You'll find PRC under menu
item 4, USD Campus-Wide Information System.
Steve Cisler <sac@apple.com> reports that the proceedings of the
landmark Ties That Bind conference on community networking are
available on Apple's Higher Education Gopher (info.hed.apple.com)
in the Apple Library Users Group/Apple Library of Tomorrow/
Community Networks Directory.
The Samaritans, a worldwide network of trained volunteers who are
willing to talk with anyone who is suicidal or despairing, now has
an Internet address, jo@samaritans.org. To contact them through
an indirect mail forwarder that will protect your anonymity, use
samaritans@anon.penet.fi.
The British Library now has a gopher server. You can gopher
directly to portico.bl.uk, or else telnet to that same address
and log in as gopher and hit the return key when it asks for a
password. Problems to portico@bl.uk.
Melanie Harper <tcsmhz@aie.lreg.co.uk> has pointed me at one
of the coolest things on the net, the "Whole Frog Project" at
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. It's a frog dissection system for
WWW. You need forms support, inline image support, and color to
really make it work. Check it out. The URL for the system is:
http://george.lbl.gov/ITG.hm.pg.docs/dissect/info.html
David Blair, who made the fabulously bizarre computer-processed
1991 film "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees",
has a MUD-WWW project going. You gotta check it out. The URL
for it is http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/wax/wax.html
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucla.edu
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles +1 (310) 825-7154
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 FAX 206-4460
USA
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Copyright 1994 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The
Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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