This address was presented by Mario Morino of The Morino Institute at the Ties That Bind conference at Apple Computer on May 5, 1994.
Copyright (c) 1994, The Morino Institute. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to copy or quote from this document; we respectfully ask, however, that you do give appropriate acknowledgement to the Morino Institute. MORINO INSTITUTE 768 Walker Road, Suite 289 Great Falls, Virginia 22066; (703)759-0477, fax: (703)759-9584, e-mail: info@morino.org
- Excerpts from a letter published in the newsletter of the Cleveland chapter of the Alzheimer's Association
These words speak volumes about the Alzheimer's Disease Support Center that was implemented on the Cleveland Free-Net. The letter (1) comes from a man whose wife was suffering terribly; as her caregiver, he was having difficulty coping. He was able to turn to the Support Center and work through his problems with the help of other caregivers like himself. The emotion and feelings this person expresses, and the importance he places on electronic communications as a tool to help him reach out to others, to communicate, and to share and receive, helps us all understand the potential that electronic communications offers our people, our communities, and our society for effecting positive social change.
This remarkable potential sets the stage for our discussion of community networking.
Community networking in the social sense is not a new concept, but using electronic communications to extend and amplify it certainly is.
We consider community networking a process, facilitated by the tools of electronic communications and information, that improves and magnifies human communication and interaction in a community by:
Bringing together people within local communities and focusing their attention on key issues within the community for debate, deliberation and resolution. Organizing human communication and information relevant to the communities' needs and problems on a timely basis. Requiring, engaging, and involving - on an ongoing basis - the participation of a broad base of citizens, including community activists, leaders, sponsors, and service providers. Striving to include people in low-income neighborhoods, those with disabilities or limited mobility, and the struggling middle class. Making basic services available at a fair and reasonable cost - or, as many espouse, at no cost - for broad-based access within the community. Most importantly, doing what commercial providers find difficult to do well: represent local culture, local relevance, local pride, and a strong sense of community ownership.
Over the past year and a half, we have explored the emergence of, and impediments to, community networking.
The philosophy and principles behind the community networking movement closely align with our own values; we believe that the local community is where our toughest social problems - crime, inadequate education, underemployment - will be solved, by the grass-roots efforts of the people who have the most personal stake in their solution. It is here that community networking takes on such relevance in helping people solve problems and addressing the needs of their day- to-day lives. Clearly, community networking is an emerging phenomenon with the potential to effect profound societal transformation.
This dichotomy between the emergence of community networking at the local level and its underrecognition and underappreciation at the national level is a major impediment to community networking. It is a formidable challenge, but also an exciting opportunity. We see community networking as an important movement that can help our society better understand the promise of electronic communications and help communities work toward positive social change - particularly over the next several years where, as many predict, there will be a difficult "shake down" period among the national information highway players. Community networking is a movement that will not only benefit localities, but in the long run contribute greatly to the realization of national and global information infrastructure initiatives. We will support efforts to advance community networking and to strengthen its acceptance, funding, and social and technical innovation.
We wish to share with you some of our findings and observations by:
Some people - the pioneers of community networking - began to see the potential of real communications systems for effecting change in their communities.
1978: First BBS 1970: ARPANET created
1980: Old Colorado City - first community-oriented BBS
1984: "St. Silicon's Hospital" medical BBS
1986: Cleveland Free-Net
1988: Big Sky Telegraph
1989: NPTN founded
1989: Santa Monica PEN
1991: Gopher, WAIS released
1992: Internet Society, CCN founded
1992: World Wide Web created
1993: Mosaic released
1993: NII: AGENDA FOR ACTION published
1994: CPB, NTIA awards announced
The listing above depicts some of the major events in the evolution of community networking.
By the end of 1991, the first generation of the community networking phenomenon had truly begun. In addition to Big Sky Telegraph and Santa Monica PEN, five other communities in Ohio and Illinois had followed the Cleveland Free-Net model and set up their own local systems - and over a dozen more were in the planning stages. Bulletin boards and computer conferencing systems like the Well in San Francisco took on a greater scope, often moving beyond the hobbyist roots of BBS's to focus more on the communities around them, as well as the virtual communities their members enjoyed. At the same time, the first wave of commercial network providers moved through the country, as the online services looked beyond their business customers to home users.
We would suggest, however, that a major acceleration has occurred over the past 12-18 months, in which we have seen a dramatic surge in interest in these systems - the beginnings of what could be a second generation of community networking. Important events like this conference are proliferating -the first half of 1994 alone has seen half a dozen such gatherings.
The Free-Net phenomenon has grown significantly. And the evolving model of the community network continues to challenge our previous notions and technologies, encompassing diverse paradigms such as the planned LaPlaza Telecommunity in New Mexico; Cupertino's CityNet; the Smart Valley Project; the recent CommerceNet; new community network cooperative models in San Francisco and Seattle; the South Bristol Learning Network in South Bristol, England; the community environment built around Pipeline in New York City . . . the list goes on and on.
Our own observations over this time - the course of our discovery period at the Morino Foundation -certainly confirm this incredible movement and we suggest four main underlying forces:
Regardless of one's position on the NII, and partisan considerations aside, it is undeniable that the initiative has raised the consciousness of people across the United States, and the world. We believe this increased awareness has drawn many, new individuals into the community networking movement, onto the Internet, and other online commercial services. More importantly, it has attracted a diverse group of people who will work to complement those already involved.
Additionally, grant programs from federal groups such as the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the National Science Foundation, Defense Conversion Funding, USDA's Rural Electrification Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, and other federal and state initiatives will create interest and activity in these areas. There is no denying that the promise of what Al Gore called the "information superhighway" just a few years ago has captured the public's attention and imagination.
Reachable hosts on the Net have increased from 700,000 at the end of 1991 - to 1.5 million in May of 1993, to over 2.2 million today - with users of all hosts potentially numbering over 10 million! A new network is connected to the Internet every 20 minutes, and new Internet services and service providers are everywhere. Adding to this explosion is an ever-increasing stream of improved software interfaces and services - including new internetworked services, powerful search tools, friendlier graphical front-end interfaces, and new information products.
We strongly believe that the desire to gain local access to the Internet has been one of the driving forces behind the growing interest and involvement with community networking. We have seen clear evidence, in online discussions and elsewhere, that users seeking access are increasingly being directed by word of mouth to community networks as Internet service providers.
This entrepreneurial excitement is also being manifested in thousands of small emerging businesses such as publishers O'Reilly and Associates, and creative non-profits such as Internet Multicasting Services. The perceived and actual progress continues to fuel an interest in community networking.
It is striking, in looking back at this period of emergence, how much of the history of the community networking movement is defined in technological terms, rather than in "human" language of actual community building. This is one of many challenges that community networkers will have to address in moving toward long-term survival and prosperity.
Clearly, the stage is set. The opportunity is directly in our sights. There is no assurance, however, that we will be able to marshal the resources, support, ingenuity, and collaboration that will allow us to collectively capitalize on this unique, historic opportunity. We will offer the first stage of a strategy to accomplish this goal, but each community must evolve its own plan to truly accomplish the broad goals we establish today.
In all candor, though, we suggest that the first option - a stalling or implosion - is quite likely and, for some, already predictable. The surge in interest must be matched with an influx of significant funding and a step-increase in the functionality and quality of the underlying technology; otherwise, an implosion is likely. There are few worse situations than an enormous build-up in interest that goes unsatisfied or, worse, is ineffectively addressed.
There is a window of opportunity in which the community networking movement must establish itself in a sustaining manner. This window of opportunity will not remain open for long, as major non-profit organizations and a raft of commercial interest parties have picked up on the importance and relevance of this emerging marketplace. This is not a time for community networkers to maintain the status quo.
The visionaries and practitioners of community networking have an opportunity of historical proportions within their reach. The process of community networking as it is now commonly understood must move itself to a higher plane, to a role of greater significance in communities and society at large. We strongly urge that these visionaries and practitioners recognize the enormous significance their contributions could have, and that they consider the steps necessary to position themselves to capitalize on this opportunity.
To this end, we present ten suggestions which we believe are critical to making the transition to a higher role and significance. These suggestions are based on the general observation we conducted, our learning of the successes and impediments community networkers have encountered, and on our own experience in interpreting similar trends in technology and organizational dynamics.
We have an opportunity of enormous significance and a window of opportunity to succeed. True success will be achieved only if community networking sets its vision high enough and stays tightly focused on supporting and enabling positive social change in our communities.
For example, economic development - the creation of jobs - is a compelling need in most communities.
More focus must be placed on cultivating broad-based economic development and career retraining, and on teaching aspiring micro- enterprises and entrepreneurs how to benefit from electronic communications. We suggest this involves a great deal more than connecting to the Chamber of Commerce or the Small Business Administration's Bulletin Board.
We urge you to consider relevance. Gain a better understanding of the people and institutions to be served and of the institutions and services involved.
Gain an understanding of what needs are going unmet - at home, in families, in the workplace, for the unemployed, in the government, social services, and so on. The well-worn clichi, "if you build it, they will come," is ineffective relative to the needs of community.
Consider the single mother who worries about her child getting shot in the locker room . . . and never getting to play on a "Field of Dreams" at all. That mother could care less about information infrastructure or community networking. Chances are, no one asked her what she might need from a network, how she could use this powerful tool to better her life - and with this inadvertent omission, another exclusive club is created to which she will never belong. Watch how vacant the "information highway" will become if this situation is allowed to spread.
Reach out into the community, talk to people, make a concerted effort to understand their needs - and then help them understand how the services of the community network can help. Such outreach and engagement will ensure a buy-in among the people of the community and an ongoing relevance to their needs.
The key to answering this question is to focus on those using the network to help effect positive social change. People are looking for results, solutions to their problems - not network access. Or, as Frank Odasz of Big Sky Telegraph likes to say, "real benefit for real people." That means, in building community networks, we should seek out and involve those individuals in the communities most capable of making things happen and ushering in changes. We need people who are willing to question the status quo, to ask what is needed, and to get good things done right now. The buy-in from these people in the community is the best insurance that the community network can address the broad range of challenges posed by the community.
We suggest two ideas to better engage and involve the community, whether you are just starting a community network or if your network is already up and running:
Expand and/or recompose your Boards of Directors. Many people take this for granted, but a good Board of Directors is crucial. By "good," we mean composed of active, engaged agents of community change - people from diverse backgrounds, with a range of relevant opinions and experiences. Your Boards should be selected to include: those who will connect you to key bases of support; those who can help you raise funding; those who will contribute management know-how; and, most importantly, those who believe in the potential of community networking and who will work to help sell and engage the people and institutions of the community. The Board should be composed of people who will continually challenge the community network to grow, to develop, and to improve - to question its own status quo.
Actively engage the community. This is a process of marketing and, hence, to many an unknown. We suggest that you proactively reach out to the community, with a formal and informal marketing communications program. Establish ongoing relations with the local media to provide occasional press coverage; conduct regular meetings to provide status and collect input and requirements from various population groups; conduct programs to educate people in awareness, competencies, and application of electronic communications; establish programs to promote what is happening on the network - relating the success stories, how people have been helped, where benefit has been realized, and when lives have been changed. More importantly, collaborate with parties who can serve as distribution channels to promote the services - the computer stores in the region, the public library, the chamber of commerce, the interfaith religious associations, and the like. In this way, you can maintain a constant presence and seamlessly become part of the fabric of the community.
Make it a top priority to compose a Board of Directors that will challenge you, represent all the people you serve, and, in turn, strengthen your ties to the community. Establish a marketing communications program to proactively and deliberately reach out and engage community members . . . to enable the community network to become an integral part of the community and an important part of people's daily lives.
This model will continue to work for small systems that remain satisfied with a relatively narrow focus - but it clearly will not hold for most community networks and the demands they will face.
The staffing requirement is much more than hiring someone to administer the network. Certainly, network administration is an important responsibility, but it is far less relevant to long-term success than staff to provide community engagement, promotional seminars, fund raising, periodic community needs assessment, education and training, telephone support, and even consulting services.
Ironically, the more successful a community network becomes, the greater the demand will be for more services, improved access, and better reliability. The community network that does not respond to these increasing demands is only creating an opportunity for another not-for-profit or commercial service to capture its clientele.
Another important point to bear in mind is that the skills to manage a growing community network are very different than those required to create the network.
Actually, these skills must change as the community network evolves and grows.
Plan a well-defined infrastructure, and staff it with full- time people who can be augmented by professional volunteers. Seek good staff, with a desire to help, possessing great people skills, communication skills and facilitation skills - along with the technical orientation essential to the nature of the system.
Clearly this is an area of heated debate and concern to existing community networks. Recent discussions in the COMMUNET and FREENET conferences, where pieces of such economic models are starting to come together, have been most encouraging on this front.
To be sure, individual communities can make their own determinations about what sort of access they want to subsidize for what groups of people. Tom Grundner and others have passionately and convincingly argued for no-cost availability of basic services; indeed, this question is being debated on a national scale in the federal Information Infrastructure Task Force, among other places. Bear in mind that free access to networks will almost always be structured around off-peak times and functions, riding in the "electronic empty spaces," as it were.
Community networks must establish a sustainable funding base from fee-based services and sustained funding sources, which are most often locally-based. Government and other grant monies can be used to supplement this base, but a sustaining economic model must not be dependent on grant funding. This requires a more creative approach to earning revenues. Here is a list of possible considerations:
To serve the needs of the community, the community network must first survive. To survive and expand to meet current and future demand, it is absolutely essential that an economic model for self-sufficiency be defined and implemented. Anything short of this imperative represents a disservice to the community being served.
Work to build your technical capacity and functionality to ensure openness and interoperability - it will be a key differential on which people judge the community network in comparison to other not-for-profit and commercial services. The importance of this factor grows disproportionately as the community places a greater dependence on the services provided by the network.
That could mean taking the reams of federal housing information and putting it in a usable context for a local homeless shelter. Or organizing scholarship information to fit the needs of disadvantaged local students. Or coordinating the efforts of the multitude of homes for battered women that might exist within a single community, whose staff are unaware of each other's existence. The key is that the information, from financial data to the oral traditions of an Indian tribe, is placed in a context people can use toward the fulfillment of community needs.
Kevin Thomas Sullivan, a communications consultant in Minneapolis, put it well on the COMMUNET list: "I believe that we can consciously choose to use information technology to help facilitate community.
Community networks will continue to thrive if they help to facilitate community. They will perish if they view themselves simply as alternative information providers. Let the commercial companies provide all the information they want; they will not be able to facilitate community because community is by definition local." (5)
Increase the relevance of your networks by adding value to the oceans of unfiltered information that are out there - be more than a posting service or pass-through service. Gather information from outside sources and place it in a local context, making it relevant to the day-to-day lives of the people in the community you serve.
Encourage the provision of points of access throughout the community, placing the access where it has the chance of engendering the greatest good - probably not public offices and shopping malls, as is so often espoused. Instead, focus on those outposts that are already in the community, where the local heroes have the gained the respect of their neighbors - locations like churches, the Salvation Army, Boys' and Girls' clubs, community youth centers, unemployment offices, Head Start centers, shelters, and wherever you can find social intermediaries who are making a difference, who are truly committed. It is these individuals that will make the difference in training and education, putting a human face on the community networking technology.
We encourage community networks to encompass the funding, technical support, equipment, and related training for points of access as part of the network's charter. Consider this requirement within your economic models and support infrastructures.
It is still a chore for most people and a barrier to many.
The ease of use question goes beyond the human/computer interface and the reliability and support of the system. Ease of use must also consider the needs of multilingual communities. Therefore, what is more important for such a community - a graphical user interface or multilingual support? Some networks must support cultures that rely on the spoken word far more than written communication. These cultural minorities certainly do not always fit our definition of economically or socially disadvantaged - but they lack access just the same. And what about individuals with disabilities who cannot see or hear the system? How many community networks today make provisions for the blind, deaf, or non-mobile? These are all questions that we must incorporate into our grand schema of community networking. Dr. C. Everett Koop, speaking at the Public Interest Summit sponsored by the Benton Foundation in March of this year, estimated that over 30% of our general population is restricted from accessing these technologies in some manner.
Work with local institutions, governmental, not-for-profit organizations, socially conscious businesses to provide multiple points of access. Develop your systems with an emphasis on ease-of-use and multiple-interface solutions for the full spectrum of your clientele.
Make the deliverables in your network worth accessing in the first place - by filtering and organizing information and knowledge in such a way that it is relevant to the people you serve.
But competition is inevitable. Consider the dialogue in the listserves and newsgroups, such as this observation made in the COMMUNET list by Ed Schwartz of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values: "The average citizen could care less whether a service is commercial or community-driven . . . If a community network lacks the resources to offer services that commercial services can, it will lose." (6)
Even more relevant is that the commercial sector and its supporting venture investment firms are beginning to take note of the potential of the local community.
Community networking practitioners should, at a minimum, pay attention to the likes of America Online, E-World, and the Imagination Network - for they could well provide relevant community- based services. Not to mention interests such as Ziff Publishing, a combined Notes service, the expected entry into commercial online services by Microsoft, the various cable programmers, and a host of other initiatives.
No threat or opportunity, however, is as great as that posed by the newspapers, local television and radio stations - and, to a lesser degree, the public television and radio stations in the local communities.
The newspaper business and television networks, in particular, possess a vast amount of local information about the community - probably much more than other services could amass without great expense and effort.
Clearly, should the newspapers, television, or radio stations consider providing community networking services, they could pose a formidable - if not dominating - competitor to current community networks. Of course, in a more positive sense, these institutions could be your greatest collaborators, as several of the recent CWEIS grantees may soon discover. The local news media in particular can be valuable partners, given their understanding of how to frame local issues and concerns and their vast repositories of locally relevant knowledge and experience.
The challenge to those in community networking is to recognize that they are in an extremely dynamic and fluid situation - politically, economically, socially, and technologically. Competition for access to the local community will be real. As in all other walks of life today, the community network should be looking at the local and external collaborations that will enable it to continue to serve its community.
Community networking has had a small voice, but even that was highly fragmented - and at times, the voices speaking for the movement were inconsistent or in conflict with each other.
We are not proposing that all of the various factions join together into a unified organization, for that would not work, nor would it be productive. Today, there are a host of parties representing community networking - the National Public Telecomputing Network, the Center for Civic Networking, Big Sky Telegraph, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Community Learning Information Network (CLIN), and Learning and Information Networks for Community Telecomputing . . . to name but a few. Additionally, there are scores of individual parties aspiring to reach national prominence such as CityNet, CapAccess, and La Plaza Telecommunity.
Our request is simple - practice what you have preached on the merits of collaboration and networking to this community. You certainly have one common interest - the advancement of community networking. Put aside your special interests and join forces - for the first time - for the advancement of community networking and your constituents. It is time to reach out to one another, to work together, to share information, and to help each other. Just as the business world has reluctantly come to grips with the fact that you have to compete and collaborate with your neighbors in a professional manner, it is time for community networking leaders to do the same.
This, indeed, is our challenge to those leaders.
In summary, we urge community networks to reexamine their operations, to focus on lasting, positive social change, and to build networks as vehicles for community action. You have the opportunity to take years of hard-earned knowledge and experience and build a powerful new communications medium that can really help people change their lives. To that end, let us restate our ten suggestions toward ensuring the survival, the relevance, and the eventual prosperity of community networking:
You have a chance to affect history. The ramifications of what we do, how we grow the true concept and practice of community networking, will be felt for generations to come.
We urge you to seize the opportunity, make this next step, truly be a part of history. We at the Morino Institute would welcome the opportunity to work with you and to help you in this quest . . . to build this communications medium into a lasting force for changing people's lives.
On behalf of the Morino Foundation, the newly formed Morino Institute, and our staff that have worked so hard to get us to this point of introduction, thank you to Apple Computer for the use of their facilities, and a special thanks for Steve Cisler for his initiative to conduct this conference.
Good luck to you all and we look forward to when our paths will cross again.
In most cases, the people we met for the first time opened up to us, many even reaching out to help. We owe so much to these people for, in many ways, they helped us shape the views expressed here. We take this opportunity to express our thanks and appreciation for the courtesy, for the knowledge and the advice, but most of all, for the encouragement you provided.
My special thanks to Ned Lilly of the Morino Foundation who conducted the research to support this paper and served as editor for its composition.
Thanks and special acknowledgment are also due to:
Kaye Gapen of Case Western Reserve University , Tom Grundner of the National Public Telecomputing Network, Ken Harmon of the KRH Group, David Hughes of Old Colorado City Communications, Frank Odasz of Big Sky Telegraph. Doug Schuler of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Ed Schwartz of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values, Linda Sowers of MarkeTek Marketing Consultants, and Kevin Thomas Sullivan of Sullivan Consulting International.
Each of these people was generous enough to help in reviewing this material and providing input.
The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action. Information Infrastructure Task Force, September 1993.
Personal conversation with David Hughes, April 26, 1994.
Kevin Thomas Sullivan, in "Communet: Community and Civic Network Discussion List," April 8, 1994.
Ed Schwartz, in "Communet: Community and Civic Network Discussion List," April 8, 1994.
