5.1 Early Community Networks in the US.

5.1.1 Community Memory - the 1970s.

Although community networks have only become prominent in the past few years, they are by no means a new invention. One of the earliest experiments in creating a community network was the Community Memory Project in Berkeley, California, during the early 1970s. Community Memory was one of the first attempts to pull the computer out of the realm of research labs, universities and large corporations and into the world of public access, and sprang directly from the anti-war and counter-culture movements that flourished in Berkeley during the late 1960s and early 70s. Two key activists behind the project were Lee Felsenstein and Efrem Lipkin. Both were firmly convinced that technology could be used for creative social ends, not just as fuel for the military-industrial complex associated with the Vietnam war. (Levy, 1984.)

Personal desktop computers did not yet exist and minicomputers of the day were expensive machines the size of refrigerators. Undeterred, Felsenstein and Lipkin pushed their vision of online communications for the people by wiring computer terminals into a record shop, the store run by the publishers of the Whole Earth Catalogue and a public library in the San Francisco Bay Area. People were encouraged to use the terminals as an electronic public notice board-posting stories, job ads and treatises on life in general. Posting comments cost a few cents, but all posts were utterly anonymous-there were no user IDs. In addition access to the system was to be had purely from the public terminals, there being no dialup support.

Despite some initial interest the project was unable to last much more than a year, a victim of underfunding, the cumbersome technology of the day and volunteer burnout. It was an interesting effort, although admittedly not a very auspicious start to community networking. (Levy, 1984. Beamish, 1995.)

5.1.2 The early 1980s.

The advent of the personal computer in the late 1970s and the availability of low-cost and low-speed modems for telecommunications purposes brought with it a resurgence of interest in affordable networking. Initially, however, most of the development was concentrated in hobbyist bulletin-board systems, and the earliest large US commercial online services such as H&R Block's CompuServe, Reader's Digest's the Source and General Electric's GEnie. (of these three, only CompuServe still exists today.)

Although the early 1980s saw the first boom in home computer sales, no major community networking initiatives came about. Microcomputers were primarily marketed as glorified video games, and computer telecommunications was still in a primitive state, plagued by arcane procedures and a vast array of incompatible hardware and software standards. Early micros were also far too limited to serve as multiple-user information hosts - that task then required much larger and much more expensive minicomputers and mainframes. Even the big commercial services were not able to make much progress in breaking out of the niche market of computer hobbyists.

Videotex systems, such as Canada's ill-fated Telidon project of the late 70s and early 80s, attempted to bring CMC to a mass audience by using common television sets as display terminals for set-top boxes. None were ever able to generate a significant user base in North America for a variety of economic and technical reasons, despite optimistic predictions - "Viewdata (ie.: videotex) is an exciting aspect of technology with tremendous benefits for society." (Martin, 1982, p. vii.) - and, in the case of Canada, significant public-sector investment.

Videotex was a failure for a variety of reasons. Personal computers were already a popular fixture in many North American homes by the time videotex finally hit its peak, and people were not willing to put up with the technical limitations and high costs of videotex when they had far more capable home computers. There was also a general lack of compelling reasons for people actually to spend the money on videotex-in some ways it was a technology in search of an application. As Eric Raymond remarks, videotex offered "people the privilege of paying to read the weather on their television screens instead of having somebody read it to them for free while they brush their teeth." (Raymond, 1996.) Although a technological white elephant in North America, videotex technology did see some success in parts of Europe, particularly in France with its Télétel (Minitel) system, owing to very different economic and political circumstances. {14}

It is interesting to consider the extent to which videotex's inherent design paradigms may have contributed to its market failings. Videotex is at its base a broadcast technology, interactive only in the sense that consumers can choose what information they want to retrieve from a selection of choices. Unlike personal computers and truly interactive Internet applications, videotex does not support user-defined information content. One of the main reasons cited for the success of Télétel compared with other forms of videotex, for example, is that users found ways of subverting Télétel's design, using it for one-to-one communications and not just the broadcast purposes its designers had intended. (Rheingold, 1993.)

5.1.3 The Cleveland Free-Net - the mid 1980s.

An important marker date for the modern community networking movement is late 1984, when Dr. Tom Grundner of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio, set up an experimental medical information system. This simple bulletin board system was designed to allow the public to leave specific health questions online, to be answered within 24 hours by a health professional. It was little more than an Apple // home computer plugged into a single telephone line, but 'St. Silicon's Hospital and Information Dispensary,' as it was jokingly dubbed, convinced Grundner that there was great potential in the electronic dissemination of important community information. (NTPN, 1993.)

Encouraged by this early success, Grundner worked with CWRU to set up the first community network to use the name 'Free-Net.' {15} This new enterprise had much broader goals than St. Silicon and its medical advice. The Cleveland Free-Net was a general public community information system tied to personal electronic mail accounts, and was launched in July of 1986 amid much fanfare from local politicians. Within months hundreds of people from across northeastern Ohio were calling in every day.

The Cleveland system was much larger than anything that had gone before it in the community networking field, although Grundner was apparently unaware of earlier efforts such as the aforementioned Community Memory. The FreeNet started on a minicomputer and by 1989 had moved to a large public-access system based on a number of networked multi-user UNIX machines. The Cleveland Free-Net could be reached by users at home with inexpensive home computers. The decision to run the FreeNet on UNIX systems, which are often connected to the worldwide Internet, was an important one. In so doing the world of freely available public community communications and information systems became linked with the rapidly expanding, but then much less accessible, world of the Internet.

5.1.4 The NTPN.

Following the great success of the Cleveland Free-Net, with its tens of thousands of registered users, Grundner left CWRU and formed the National Public Telecomputing Network (NTPN), an organization that he likened to the US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) with its mandate to promote high-quality non-commercial television programming. He saw the NTPN as a national body to coordinate the growth and development of FreeNet style community networks across the US.

In addition to common lobbying and support processes he also saw the NTPN as developing a common content base, which he called 'cybercasting;' analogous to broadcasting. This common content base would originate at various FreeNets across the country and be distributed to the entire network, much as PBS television programming originates at individual PBS affiliate stations and is then distributed across the US. The prime focus of the NTPN's 'cybercasting' material would be its Academy One K-12 (kindergarten through grade 12) educational content.

The NTPN has been arguably quite successful in achieving some of its goals. There are dozens of NTPN-affiliated community networks in the US, and the total number of users on those systems approaches half a million; the size of many of the individual larger commercial online services. (NTPN 1993. Schuler, 1995.) The past two years, however, has seen a good deal of internal turmoil within the organization, and its momentum has definitely faltered. At this time it is unclear what the long-term chances are for the NTPN networking model. There are signs that the organization's executive is attempting to rebuild the NTPN, but many of the online discussions concerning the organizational structure of community networks in the US are now focusing around the creation of a more informal network of organizations.

5.2 Community networks in Canada.

5.2.1 Other Canadian community networks.

Following the successes of Victoria and Ottawa, community network organizing committees soon formed across the country. The next two years saw tremendous interest in community networks, with Vancouver, Halifax, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto and a host of smaller centres gaining organizing committees and, later, active community networks.

There was relatively little national coordination in the creation of these networks. There was also no federal government funding despite recommendations from the Information Highway Advisory Council, (Information Highway Advisory Council, 1995) and so each organization sprang up out of its own set of regional and political circumstances. As a result the nature of each organization is quite different. Here are a few brief capsule histories of some of the larger and more prominent Canadian community network organizations.

Halifax, with its Chebucto Community Net, has been successful in exploring workable alternatives to telephone line access. Their system, based on World Wide Web standards and not on CWRU's FreePort, uses cable systems in the Halifax region for part of its data transmission. It gained a great deal of early support and exposure through an alliance with the Halifax Daily News, one of the city's daily newspapers. Its technical facilities are run through Dalhousie University's Department of Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computing Science. Chebucto has also dedicated considerable resources to producing a standardized set of software that can be used by other community networks. This package of software, referred to as the 'Chebucto Suite' and based around the Lynx text-only World Wide Web browser, is in use on many other community networks. (David Trueman, personal communication, 1996.)

Montreal's Libertel Montréal received fairly strong support from the provincial government, in large part owing to the relative paucity of commercial Internet providers in that province until fairly recently. The government of Quebec decided that contributing to the development of a local community network would help stimulate growth in the provision of Internet services in the province. It also believed that the promotion of a community network would be politically useful for increasing the percentage of French-language content on online systems, which remain predominantly English. Unfortunately the Libertel was a long time in development despite this support, and did not open until August of 1996. (André Laurendeau, personal communication, 1996.)

The Toronto FreeNet, (TFN) for its part, had close initial ties with both the provincial government and big business. It was the beneficiary of a large sum of money from the Ontario provincial government - half a million dollars over three years. In addition it received an equivalent amount of corporate funding and support from Rogers Cablesystems, Canada's largest cable television company. In fact, Rogers houses the TFN in its Markham, Ontario, technical operations centre. Little is known about the precise nature of this arrangement, because part of the contract with Rogers stipulates that no information about the deal can be made public: a fact that some in the Canadian networking community find uncomfortable. I was unable to learn much more about the TFN because nobody with the organization responded to my email queries.

Manitoba's Blue Sky Community Networks followed quite a different model. Most large Canadian community networks started in urban areas, in part because of the presence of large post-secondary educational institutions that provided support and also because of the large population bases reachable within a free local telephone dialling area. Blue Sky, although started in Winnipeg, moved to help tie the widely dispersed rural communities of the province together. It did so by acting as a provincial umbrella organization. It has also worked closely with the province's 61 First Nations bands and the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs to help bring CMC to reserves across the province. An aboriginal system named "People First Net" has been started by Blue Sky, with some federal seed funding. Blue Sky has also done a good deal of work pioneering "virtual" community networks - that is to say, hosting community networks for smaller rural communities on the main Winnipeg-based hardware. The scope of the Manitoba system is thus quite ambitious. Blue Sky was founded in January of 1994, and the Winnipeg node was officially opened that November. There are now 27 community networks in Manitoba which make up the Blue Sky umbrella organization. The largest node in Winnipeg has 96 dialup lines with 104 terminals in public libraries and 25 terminals in city drop-in centres. Manitoba's rural libraries will also be joining the Blue Sky initiative as a partnership. (Michael Gillespie, personal communication, 1996.)

The Edmonton FreeNet, which came online in October of 1994, has moved the furthest away of any Canadian community network from the strict FreeNet model of free (no cost) access. Unlike the other community nets listed here, which rely entirely upon voluntary donations and the largesse of government and corporate sponsors, the Edmonton system relies to a great extent on a mandatory $25 per annum membership fee. (Calgary has since followed Edmonton's lead in this regard.) Provisions are made for low-income individuals to request a waiver of the fee, but otherwise Edmonton requires payment from each individual or organization desiring access. The community network now has three paid staff positions, approximately 11,000 members and 106 dialup lines. (Keith Gross, personal communication, 1996.)

5.2.2 Telecommunities Canada and the federal government.

Volunteers with community networks across the country soon became aware of the common problems faced by their respective organizations, and plans were laid to form a Canada-wide umbrella organization. Telecommunities Canada (TC) was founded in August of 1994, initially to lobby the federal government for ongoing support and to help provide assistance to startup organizations. TC was also closely involved with three annual conferences to bring volunteers of the nation's community networks together. These have proved successful, and a fourth is planned for the summer of 1996 in Edmonton.

In recent months, however, TC's focus on lobbying the federal government has been shifting. It has become increasingly clear that the federal government does not view ensuring the sustainability of the community networking movement as part of its mandate, and has not been very responsive to TC's lobbying efforts in this area.

Industry Canada's Community Access Program (CAP) has been instrumental in the formation of small rural community networks across the country, but appears to be viewed by the ministry as a seed program to kickstart public demand for commercial services in those areas. TC, with its interest in seeing community networks nationwide become self-sustaining and well-supported, has a fundamental ideological conflict with the Industry Canada position in this regard. One respondent described this conflict as being, in part, "the whole issue of whether community networks are a loss leader - or a transmission belt - to the commercial users or whether they have an importance in their own right." Additionally, CAP focuses on simple access provision, as its name suggests, whereas TC is particularly interested in the broader question of developing public space online.

The result of this conflict has been growing tension and animosity between TC and the federal ministry. The former is frustrated with what it sees as the latter's total refusal to promote the development of community-controlled public space along with a failure to provide ongoing grant monies and institutionalized support so that the newly born community networks do not die within a year or two of their formation, for lack of funds. The latter is frustrated with what it sees as a small group of ideologues trying to interfere with the smooth running of its program by altering the terms of its mandate. Given this disagreement between TC and the federal government over the fundamental directions of community networking, Telecommunities Canada has recently moved markedly towards focusing its attentions at a provincial level instead. (Garth Graham, Telecommunities Canada, personal communication, 1996.)

5.2.3 Telecommunities Canada and the NTPN.

Although the NTPN had a modest amount of influence in the early days of the Canadian community networking movement, with Victoria and the NCF receiving some attention from the US organization during their startup days, things have shifted in the past two or three years. Particularly with the formation of Telecommunities Canada, many Canadian community networks felt that their interests were not being served by the NTPN. However it was ownership of the name 'FreeNet' that proved to be the most important and contentious issue.

Although many Canadian community networks have been using variants of the name since as early as 1992 the name 'FreeNet' is actually a registered service mark and thus the legal intellectual property of the NTPN, which quietly acquired the Canadian rights to the name in the same year. Since Canada's federal trademark law overrides any provincial legislation governing the use of names by societies, the NTPN could, if it chose, legally force all Canadian organizations to stop using the names 'FreeNet' or 'Free-Net' as a service mark, or comply with its own terms. In fact, this is exactly what it attempted to do.

The NTPN's position was that any organization that calls itself a FreeNet should conform with some basic standards of service, thus ensuring that the consumer has access to a uniformly high quality product, to use the metaphor of marketing. However this unavoidably involves placing certain restrictions on what local organizations can and cannot do. The NTPN's list of requirements, such as the demand that the name 'Free-Net' always be hyphenated, were not well received by most Canadian community networks, and a majority of Canadian FreeNets refused to pay NTPN membership fees accordingly.

Canadian networks found a number of other NTPN policies contentious, particularly the costs for ongoing membership and some of the restrictions imposed by membership. In 1995 the NTPN increased its membership rates to $2000 US per year, and also required that each FreeNet carry NTPN content, including its Academy One educational material. This sum of money is quite large, particularly for smaller organizations, and many Canadian groups resented the pressure from the US to carry specifically US-related information content. According to organizers of Canadian community networks who have been in conversation with the NTPN, the US organization has not expressed any interest in addressing the questions of the cultural appropriateness of its material. For example, its Academy One information consists of educational content geared directly towards the American school system, such as information on American presidents and the US constitution.

The issue was finally resolved in August of 1996, when TC and the NTPN came to an agreement. Under the terms of this agreement TC members may use the name 'FreeNet,' and TC is likely to pay a nominal fee to the NTPN in recognition of the latter's ownership of the name. Additionally the issue of US-specific content now appears moot, as the NPTN's cybercasting initiative has largely fallen apart.

Nevertheless, the dispute prompted many Canadian FreeNets, including St. John's, Chebucto, Blue Sky, Vancouver and Victoria, to rename themselves, becoming 'community networks' or other variants on the same theme. Those organizations that changed their name report that, although the name 'FreeNet' is both euphonious and recognized, they were having problems with people assuming that 'free' meant that nobody had to pay for use of the network's services. The switch away from 'FreeNet' thus has some useful marketing-related consequences for community networks struggling with low donation levels.

5.2.4 BC Community Networks.

Not all community networks have been in large urban centres. British Columbia is particularly notable for having a rapidly growing base of small networks in the province's rural areas and smaller towns. Already there are operating systems in Squamish (the Sea to Sky FreeNet serving the Sunshine Coast), Trail, Prince George, Qualicum Beach / Parksville, Vanderhoof, Campbell River and a number of other large towns and small cities. There are over a dozen committees in the province either running or planning to develop a community network, and a full list is provided in Appendix B. The popularity of these small community networks may be attributable to the remote and hard to reach nature of many interior BC communities, owing to the rugged and mountainous terrain of much of the province. This may lead to a somewhat greater sense of isolation, and thus network connections could be an attractive way to keep in touch with the outside world.

In an attempt to coordinate the lobbying efforts of BC's community networks an organization named BC FreeNet - later renamed BC Community Networks - was formed in December of 1993 to serve as a unified voice for the various committees and associations. The aim of this organization has largely been to lobby the provincial government and its ministries for funding and to negotiate with corporations for community network support.

Unfortunately, so far the BC government has not lent any significant support to any community networks aside from a small startup grant to Victoria, the odd contribution from individual government ministries, and a small sum to BC Community Networks to establish an informational Web page. The government's current stance, as articulated in its Electronic Highway Accord and Communities Connect Program, is that it will only consider providing seed funding for new community networks and like organizations - sustainability for existing organizations does not interest them. (Government of BC, 1996)

For its part BC Community Networks has maintained a low-key presence. It has not attempted to focus on generating public awareness but, has instead apparently concerned itself with low-level backroom lobbying with the provincial government.

The next chapter examines some of the BC community networks in more detail, drawing upon the interviews conducted for this thesis.