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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
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
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
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
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
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ```