CRTC Submission - 29 Mar 95 /TC
A background paper supporting Telecommunities Canada's appearance,
March 29 1995, at the CRTC public hearings on information highway
convergence.
A DOMAIN WHERE THOUGHT IS FREE TO ROAM:
THE SOCIAL PURPOSE OF COMMUNITY NETWORKS
Prepared for Telecommunities Canada
By Garth Graham
aa127@freenet.carleton.ca
March 29, 1995
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"The only credential that should be needed to enter any
conversation about the nature of the world is one's humanity.
Who's to say who is a crackpot? None of us is qualified to make
that judgement. None of us is capable of pronouncing the last
word on anything but the furnishings of our own minds, and even
that is debatable. This is why we best serve the cause of truth by
expanding and defending the domain in which thought is free to
roam..."
Edwin Dobb. Without earth there is no heaven.
Harpers Magazine, February 1995, 41.
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MESSAGES FROM THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
Community networks experience the Knowledge Society directly. How
does a checklist of their concerns match up with the framework of
questions addressed by the Canadian information highway debate? We
don't yet know. We do know that the current debate carries forward
assumptions about markets, communications, and learning based on
industrial society points-of view. We offer this checklist as one means
of finding out. We also note that, well in advance of the plans of
governments and business, tens of thousands of Canadians are eagerly
joining community networks. We ask - why is their experience being
ignored?
Imagine you have just been elected to the board of an association that is
growing a community network. This means that you are about to make a
substantial and direct contribution to Canada's transition to a Knowledge
Society. As you face this responsibility, what principles do you keep in
mind? What criteria should guide a community network in sustaining its
autonomy, viability and integrity in the face of rapid social
transformation? Here are ten dimensions of a Knowledge Society that
govern how a community network defines its purpose and role:
1. LIFE IN A KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
Community networks are about people, not technology. Community
networks let people learn how to live in a Knowledge Society. By
creating community networks, Canadian communities are grabbing hold
of the potential for community development to be found in new
communications media. Unlike other institutions, community networks
are not struggling to transform themselves to fit a Knowledge Society.
They are already creatures of that society. We can understand how
people actually behave in a Knowledge Society by understanding why
people commit themselves to and use community networks. Expressing
this experience loudly and clearly moves public policy dialogue away
from talking about markets and consumers and toward talking about
responsible citizenship.
2. CYBERSPACE AS ELECTRONIC COMMONS
A community network is electronic public space where ordinary people
can meet and converse about common concerns. Like parks, civic
squares, sidewalks, wilderness, and the sea, it's an electronic commons
shared by all, not a cyberspace shopping mall. Government's role in
cyberspace is to balance commercial use and social use of an electronic
commons that belongs to everyone.
3. RENEWING COMMUNITY VIA SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIP
Community networks are in essence, a true example of "domesticating
cyberspace." They are net-based social integration acting within a
framework of a social movement. Almost anyone can take hold of
interactive computer mediated and networked communications and use it
to participate significantly in community life and social development.
The direct socio-economic impact of a Community Network is that it
makes human institutions human again.
4. HONORING OTHERNESS IN CONVERSATION
There is a rule-of-thumb in community development, "People want to
talk." If you provide them the means, they will do so. That rule-of-
thumb certainly squares with the early experience in organizing
community networks. The Net does not produce chaos in human
relationships. It produces fluidity. Anyone with imagination and a
certain self-centered confidence can use that fluidity to build a
multitude of new associations based on either emotional or practical
shared interests.
5. LEARNING THROUGH EXPERIENCE
Community networks are primary vehicles for Canadians, as private
individuals, to learn about and gain access to networked services. The
pay-off for participating in a community network is more in the learning
that occurs, than it is in the informing. Learning is particular to the
individual, and it comes from risking your ideas in conversations with
others. But, beyond individual experience, there is even a learning pay-
off in economic terms. Community networks are doing the job of
telecommunications, broadcast and network industries in creating
markets, and we're doing it for nothing. There is no better way to learn
than for free.
6. EXPRESSING LOCAL IN THE FACE OF THE GLOBAL
At its ultimate, globalized decoupling of corporations from local
resources heads us toward a social restructuring where all that is left is
the purely global and the purely local. But what will connect the local to
the global? Money speaks for global socio-economic aggregations. Who
speaks for relationship in the place where you live now? Community
networks provide a powerful means of action for people who want to
address that need.
7. EXPRESSING CULTURE AS IDENTITY, NOT COMMODITY
Although community networks are "on" the Internet, they should never be
seen as mere providers of Internet access services. That
misapprehension confuses their role with commercial services to the
detriment of both. Community networks are Canadian culture made
manifest. Canada's presence in community networks on the Net is a
global expression of Canada's role and identity in cyberspace. It is a
picture of ourselves being ourselves, for ourselves, but that picture is
also available for any of our netsurfing visitors. Contributing this
dynamic picture of local "culture" is an important part of civic
responsibility in a Knowledge Society. It gives back to the Net as much
or more than it takes out.
8. BEING INTERACTIVE MEANS TALKING BACK
Business and government only have an interest in broadband channel
capacity into the home. Their first priority is for systems with a
limited response capacity built into the return channel. This is because
they see citizens only in the guise of consumers of electronic goods and
services. For reasons of cost, they hope to limit the return channel to
mean our option to hit the "buy-icon" in reply. It's our responsibility to
ensure that every citizen can talk back in the same volume that they are
talked at.
9 FREE HAS A PRICE
Community networks are efficient and very effective methods of
achieving universal access to computer mediated communications, and
universal participation in the new networked social structures of the
Knowledge Society. But they are not cheap. A community net, by
definition, cannot be a business. If its primary goal is to supply services
for profit, it's not a community network. But we do have to make it clear
that the movement is exploring a range of methods to make enough money
to pay its own way. We also have to spell out that the 'low cost" access
to services that we provide for social purposes has direct economic
benefit. In effect, our voluntary efforts contribute directly to creating
rich national infrastructure. On a national scale, that unacknowledged
contribution to content is very cost effective. It's business that's
getting the free ride, not community networks.
10. UNIVERSAL PARTICIPATION AND EQUITY OF OPPORTUNITY
The federal government has stated three strategic objectives for the
information highway: jobs, cultural identity and universal access. We
would submit that community networks address these objectives head
on. And they do so in a manner that is compatible with the excitement
generated by that prototype of Knowledge Society institutions, the
Internet. In community networks, the volunteers that participate in
bringing a community online are investing their own time in learning new
skills and roles. Community networks intensively collate community
knowledge and experience, leading to a bottom-up global sharing of
Canadian identity on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. And
community networks provide a powerful model of how universal access
to the information highway can actually be used. They don't just create a
society of consumers. They do support citizens in sustaining local
communities that better meet their needs. Whatever process Canada
uses to decide its response to an Knowledge Society, it must take into
account the transformative power of community networks.
----------------------------------------------------
LEARNING TO LIVE IN A KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
Direct experience of the Knowledge Society defines the purpose and role
of community networks as follows:
1. LIFE IN A KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
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"In an era where knowledge is at the cutting edge of
competitiveness, social policy as it relates to human capital and
skills formation becomes indistinguishable from economic policy."
Thomas J. Courchene. Social Canada in the millennium:
reform imperatives and restructuring principles.
Toronto, C.D.Howe Institute, 1994, 233.
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"The right answer to the question Who takes care of the social
challenges of the Knowledge Society? is neither the government
nor the employing organization. The answer is a separate and new
SOCIAL SECTOR....Government demands compliance; it makes rules
and enforces them. Business expects to be paid; it supplies.
Social-sector institutions aim at changing the human being."
Peter F. Drucker. The age of social transformation.
The Atlantic Monthly, November 1994. 75-76.
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Community Networks are new distributed forms of social organization.
For purely local purposes, they take advantage of the functions inherent
in the Internet. They provide space for people to explore learning about
life in a Knowledge Society under conditions they can define for
themselves. Unlike health services, schools and libraries, they are NOT
being transformed by the transition to a Knowledge Society. They are
already creatures of that society.
Canada's problem is NOT the construction of a technological
communications and information infrastructure. We can already see how
that will emerge on it own. The problem is that we don't yet understand
how equity and universal participation can be achieved in our transition
to a knowledge-based economy. We already know the old institutions and
organizational structures don't work. But we can't yet sense how the
new pieces and forms of socio-economic relationship fit together.
Community networks give anyone the chance to join with the neighbours
in discovering new ways to mesh the pieces of a Knowledge Society.
Information Highway public policy debate is concentrated on the
production of electronic goods and services and on information
technology management. Because its eye is fixed on markets, profits and
commodifying citizens as consumers, it misses the broader implications
of social transformation. New forms of organization must be oriented
toward the tasks of thinking and knowing. Existing public policy is
attempting to shelter institutions from the pain of change. But the tasks
of thinking and knowing have never been central to the purposes of
existing institutions. Community networks help people see how
processes of learning, thinking and knowing structure social and
economic organizations in a Knowledge Society.
Why does government buy into the notion of citizen as consumer, and the
business of government as merely "delivering" services? This action
shows that government has institutionalized its relations with citizens
as a matter of service providers separate from clients. True governance
involves treating that relationship as matters of social contract or
bargained political accommodation - ie, as dialogue, not just service.
After all, even if we no longer believe it, it's still OUR government.
When community networks act as gateways into networked government
services they re-affirm our right to understand and talk about the basic
purpose of services, not just the means of their delivery.
Rational technocrats see the world as a machine. Facing the social
interfaces of a Knowledge Society, they can't see anything but the
machine that they already expect. Netters understand that the human -
machine symbiosis is inherently social. Why else would we call it "Bob"
and set about finding ways to get it to talk? Netters see that the
boundaries of networks as dynamic social systems are vague and
permeable. In the best of their social perceptions, netters are
omnidirectional, informal, friendly, open minded, comfortable,
optimistic and courageous. Netters see that there are many possible
worlds, and that all of them are self-organized through learning and
autonomy in individual choice, not through power and authority.
In the Industrial Age, in the interests of motivation, rational people said
"Get serious." In a Knowledge Society, in the interests of learning,
imaginative people say, "Get curious." Wealth and power is already
attempting to block curiosity in the interest of retaining control. That's
why they are using the mass media to spread fear about loss of privacy,
theft of intellectual property, social isolation and the inherent
maliciousness of hackers. But by trying to contain curiosity, they lose
the control they seek. The experience of community netters is exactly
opposite from those fears. Computer mediated communications
intensifies and enhances how people express themselves and relate to
each other. Since the reflex to control directly contradicts how the
relational self actually behaves in networked systems as social systems,
it is self-defeating.
Community Networks anticipate life a society where networked
connectivity makes new modes of interactive communication
ubiquitously available. This transforms the modes of relationship that
structure all human organizations in fundamental ways. But who is
responsible for the emergent social structures of a Knowledge Society
and a global knowledge-based economy? We already know that
corporations have seized control of globalizing institutions. But the
battle for control of local institutions is not yet lost. Our purpose as
missionaries of connectivity must be to ensure that responsibility for
control of community communications remains at the community level.
If public policy debate did shift toward an understanding of social
consequences, then the question of universality would move away from
"access" to technology and toward "participation" in the transforming
social relationships that organize the new institutions of a Knowledge
Society.
2. CYBERSPACE AS ELECTRONIC COMMONS
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"Experts predict that the future of the Internet is in context.
Content (information) saturates more of the Net every day. In a
free market of information brokers catering to critically-minded
consumer-manufacturers, small media will be able to articulate
and focus the concerns of people and communities in ways that
mass media cannot. Small media that can provide credibility and
familiarity, like small businesses, will replace the corporate
dinosaurs in the info-ecological niche. The concept of the global
village (as a kind of global meta-tropolis) will give way to the
reality of a network of global villages - millions of self
sustaining communities that connect and overlap in a human
system that models the distributed technology of the Internet
itself."
Greg Searle. Telecommons Development Group, Guelph.
Personal email to Adbusters, December 6, 1994.
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There are a number of characteristic which make the village
square a unique and vibrant place. It is open to all people, no
matter what their economic status, gender, race or political
views. It encourages, by its very structure, two-way
communication. It is a hub around which commerce revolves, but
on which commerce is not the central concern. It is subject only
to the laws of society, and not to the arbitrary rules that govern
private spaces such as shopping malls or condominiums. The
village square is public space. To be a village square, the
information highway must have these same characteristics.
Canada's cyberspace must be public space.
Mark Surman. Submission in Response to
IHAC Access Report. March 2, 1995.
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Government's role in cyberspace is to balance commercial use and social
use of a commons that belongs to everyone. The access portals to it are,
of course, communications and information technology. Business must
have a fair rate of return on investment on construction of the gateways,
but not via any manner that represents enclosure of the commons. We
must advocate community control of the communications technology, and
personal control of the off/on switch.
A community network is electronic public space where ordinary people
can meet and converse about common concerns. Like parks, civic
squares, sidewalks, wilderness, and the sea, it's an electronic commons
shared by all, not a cyberspace shopping mall. Malls serve corporations,
not communities. Beware of the corporate "televised" vision of a
Knowledge Society. It's mall writ large. Interactive television as
broadband into the home, and just enough channel capacity out from the
home to register clicking on the "buy icon," is virtual space for
corporations to deliver audiences to advertisers. Members of community
networks actively participate in communicating the experience of life in
their community. They are never audiences.
"Electronic common" avoids the so called tragedy of the common because
of the feedback automatically built into networked communications
systems. In open and distributed systems, each node knows how it can
relate to any other node, but also knows how it relates to the aggregate
relationship of all other nodes. The system shows all it's users,
including yourself, the consequences of your use. But this only works if
all systems are open systems and structured from the bottom up.
"Market" driven systems design is centralizing control to enclose
cyberspace for commercial gain.
A view of cyberspace as market makes you think about personal control
of private property in order to sell it as a commodity. A view of
cyberspace as community makes you think about public and distributed
control of a commons to sustain universal participation in its benefits.
A Knowledge Society will, of course have markets, but it will not work if
markets totally dominate its infrastructure. We must be advocates of
total respect for each person's ability to THINK, to understand
themselves and their fastforward relation to a multiplicity of worlds.
In the public interest, it is the role of government regulation to ensure
that Canadian business does NOT capture control of the defining
institutional means of achieving an equitable and participatory
Knowledge Society. Government regulation can allow Canadian
corporations all of the networked connectivity they desire, as long as
they do NOT get to own an "information highway." A national
infrastructure of tollgates will not create equity of opportunity or a
political economy of knowledge. It will privatize public life out of
existence.
3. RENEWING COMMUNITY VIA SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIP
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"We live in the machine. That's why we have things like virtual
corporations, virtual classrooms, virtual communities, and
de-institutionalized workers, teachers, student, etc. The huge
machine represented by global - now converging multi-media -
information systems represents the new organizing context, the
new all-pervasive institution within which everything comes
together in space and time. And the systems and applications
software are what drives it. What makes sense of it all - sense to
you and I? We need to make sure we have a way to check this out."
Heather Menzies. Learning communities and the
information highway. Speaking notes to the CADE
Annual Meeting, Vancouver, May 12, 1994.
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Communities have more commitment to their members than
service delivery systems have to their clients.....Professionals
and bureaucracies deliver services; communities solve problems....
Institutions and professionals offer "service"; communities offer
"care."....Communities enforce standards of behavior more
effectively than bureaucracies or service professionals....
Communities focus on capacities; service systems focus on
deficiencies.
John McKnight. Quoted in:
Osborne and Gaebler. Reinventing government.
Addison-Wesley 1992, 66-70.
***********************************************
Community Networks provide a means whereby those who want to take
personal responsibility for a sense of community can come together and
act. In "applications" terms, the technology assists people to group. The
concept of community in cyberspace is new, but it has the same four
critical elements that shape the best in communities of geographic
location: shared values, unity, intimacy and free expression.
Electronic networked community, as an interacting body of individuals
grouped around a common interest or location, codifies and makes
self-referential a community's "knowledge base" about itself.
Community networks are in essence, a true example of "domesticating
cyberspace." They are net-based social integration acting within a
framework of a social movement. Almost anyone can take hold of
interactive computer mediated and networked communications and use it
to participate significantly in community life and social development.
The direct socio-economic impact of a Community Network is that it
makes human institutions human again. We begin to see organizations as
relationship networks and not, as we have for the last 150 years, as
machines. A Net makes us human again because, on the Net, YOU are the
boss. On the Net, nobody needs or dares to represent anyone else. The
most significant behaviour that the Net rewards is maturity. The most
significant social categorization from the Industrial Age that converges
and disappears is that of leader and follower. The Net sustains the
relationships of people who are self-confident and autonomous in
defining and expressing themselves. Such people do not transfer
responsibility for their actions onto others.
The "product" of a community network is a CITIZEN who knows how to use
computer mediated communications to develop both community and the
type of personal knowing and learning that will let them function
effectively within an electronic commons. This citizen understands how,
from the bottom up, community networks can integrate divergent groups
and divergent points of view into common responses surrounding
necessary and responsible social action - without the necessity of
coalescing political or economic power. Since participation is a matter
of individual choice, the levels of participation in a successful online
dialogue are very much related to an expectation that participation will
result in a shared experience. What works best in computer mediated
communications is the absence of power-based relationships. It is
mutual interdependence that defines community, not hierarchy.
Community Networks use computer mediated communications for social
action. In the beginning, the people who understand CMC are generally
clueless about social action, and the people who understand community
development have a limited tolerance for the subtleties of information
technology management. A community network needs people with well
developed skills in both CMC and community service. It's the job of a
Community Network Board to ensure balance in the essential alliance of
these two core competencies in creating local electronic public space.
Community Nets, of necessity, are becoming arbiters of customary use
and appropriate behavior in electronic public space, both locally AND
globally. All of Community Network associations are struggling with
netiquette. Approaches to netiquette will eventually need to be
hardwired into the governance of a community network, but for now
we're all learning from the school of hard knocks. Direct responsible
action is important because we do NOT want someone to do this for us!!!
It's not just "availability" or "access" that makes these net "public." It's
also a question of identity. Who gets to define "membership" in the
network? "Membership" in this sense does not refer to the formal
registration process. If membership is self-defined, rather than imposed
by virtue of participation in the hosting networked organization, then the
participants are defining the organizational boundary of the network
themselves, but also their relationship to it. A network is public if
everyone is autonomous in choosing to use it, if the act of use is a public
act.
There is a far broader issue imbedded in this issue of identity and choice.
The question of how self definition occurs in networks cuts to the heart
of the purpose of "interactivity." A network is public if it grants me
autonomy in defining my "self" in relation to "others" (ie. that net as a
society or community of users). If an electronic space is a place in
cyberspace where, predominantly, I get to choose who "I" am, then that is
a public place. When government relates to me as client and the Mall
relates to me as consumer, the need for a space in which I get to tell my
own story intensifies.
4. HONORING OTHERNESS IN CONVERSATION
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In a conversation, you always expect a reply. And if you honor the
other party to the conversation, if you honor the OTHERNESS of the
other party, you understand that you must not expect always to
receive a reply that you foresee or a reply that you will like. A
conversation is immitigably two-sided and always to some degree
mysterious; it requires faith.
Wendell Berry. What are people for? San Francisco,
North Point Press, 1990, 209.
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Communications is itself self-replicating. Sign unto others as
you'd have them sign unto you. Pass it on.
Michael Berube. Life as we know it.
Harper's Magazine, December 1994, 51.
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There is the story of a couple who knew hundreds of dirty jokes so
well that they would merely recite numbers to each other. The
few digits would call up an entire story and send one or the other
into uncontrollable laughter.
Nicholas Negroponte. Being digital.
Alfred A. Knopf 1995, 31.
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Community networks demonstrate that values of community, friend,
neighbour, cooperation, family, trust, mutual respect and tolerance ARE
inherent in networked social relations. Their members are people who
already know that the primary purpose of a Knowledge Society is to
speak, to hear and be heard, and to relate to others. They feel that the
central issues are about expression and active participation in
community, not passive consumption. They know that you get knowledge
by giving knowledge.
To achieve the maximum exchange in "shared frameworks of
understanding," it is absolutely essential that systems be open and
distributed. Through self-reference, the Net can intensify our mutual
stories about how the world might work to a point that deepens both
meaning in communications and the experiential knowing that occurs as
a consequence. But to reach that point, the choice to relate must rest
with the individual.
When we intensify relationship through networking, we accelerate both
the means and the pace at which we create and exchange ideas. This is
self expression in a new medium. It externalizes the defining
dimensions of personal identity in a new way. We are autonomous
individuals working in networked groups toward generally agreed
purposes and within shared but shifting perceptions of common
objectives. Because of the networking of relationship, a perception of a
need to shift objectives that occurs to one autonomous individual can be
communicated rapidly to the group. If it fits but is a difference that
makes a difference, the drift of everyone's thinking changes direction.
Negroponte estimates that, between husband and wife, 100,000 bits of
information are conveyed by the wink of an eye. This is because the
sender and the receiver have an enormous reservoir of shared
understanding. Each of us must listen hard enough to learn (by
experience) what it's like to be to be someone else. The more we share
our perception of realities, the higher the flow of meaning in the
simplest of communications exchanges.
Two-way communications transactions alter mutual frames of reference
for all participants through re-iteration. Each participates. Each
observes the participation. The role of networked computer mediated
communications is to convey that participation; but also to mirror the
observation, so that each participant can watch themselves watching
themselves. Suddenly the communications process rules governing
transaction can change, because feedback makes the context in which
those rules are operating instantly and constantly available. When
there's conviviality in conversation; where each talking transaction is
also about talking, the sum of all transactions approaches the harmony of
a song. The informing of you is also the informing of myself. Stability
in sustaining relationship as social system becomes self-organizing.
Community network projects are magnets for enthusiastic, committed
and competent volunteer support. There is a rule-of-thumb in community
development, "People want to talk." If you provide them the means, they
will do so. That rule-of-thumb certainly squares with the early
experience in organizing community networks. The Net does not produce
chaos in human relationships. It produces fluidity. Anyone with
imagination and a certain self-centered confidence can use that fluidity
to build a multitude of new associations based on either emotional or
practical shared interests. It is in relation to each other that we learn
and grow. In new relationships we re-create ourself, and thus increase
radically our capacity to learn from relationship. Self knowledge is the
one and only coin of the realm in a Knowledge Society.
5. LEARNING THROUGH EXPERIENCE
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"Sophisticated services will benefit from having civic nets carry
the burden of introducing the public to the world of global
electronic communication and services. People who have a strong
need for such services will turn to commercial vendors for
superior service and improved access. Supporting civic nets is the
cheapest way business can support the development of a market
for more sophisticated services."
Sam Sternberg. Why create community networks?
Networks and Community, January 16, 1994.
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"A more rapid development of IT mass literacy will dramatically
change all of the product / service penetration and earning
projections that are now based on the assumption of a continued
low rate of public participation. This increased familiarity and
competence in handling public information will translate into a
public expectation and demand for private sector value-added
products and services...By providing a broad base of salient public
information and communications services, with no mandatory
entry fee, the FreeNets are attracting Canadians at a rate that was
unimagined, even by the most optimistic FreeNet organizers."
Jay Weston. National Capital FreeNet Comment on the
CRTC Review of Regulatory Framework, Telecom
Public Notice CRTC 92-78, November 25, 1993.
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We are not just teaching network access skills. We are teaching skills
for the use of interactive communications media in social relation and
self-expression. Community networks are primary vehicles for
Canadians, as private individuals, to learn about and gain access to
networked services. This creates markets for those services. But the
pay-off for individual participation in a community network is more in
the experiential learning that occurs, than it is in the passive access to
services that inform. Learning is particular to the individual, and it
comes from risking your ideas in conversations with others. The demand
for active experiential connectivity will be infinitely greater than the
demand for services.
Everyone assumes that our "transformation" to a Knowledge Society is
somehow about the future. From the experience of community networks,
we know that social change has already occurred. We know that the
technology did not cause the change. How could we imagine such an
exquisite tool for new ways of communicating unless we already knew
that we wanted to communicate in new ways? The technologies merely
express new forms of human relationship that are the product of
underlying shifts in the basic cultural attitudes we have about each
other. You cannot manage a change that has already occurred. You can
only understand it. Community networks provide the best means possible
to learn the appropriate behaviours of a Knowledge Society through hands-
on experience.
Community Networks are comfortable places where small business
entrepreneurs can learn on their own terms what it feels like to operate
in a network, and thus prepare themselves for the competitive realities
of using electronic data interchange and encrypted signature as the basis
of commercial transaction.
Industrial Society institutions separate education, learning, and living.
In a Knowledge Society, learning and living "converge," so that the
experience basis of action becomes paramount. The "doing" of something
and the "learning how to do it" are no longer separated. In an Industrial
Society, it is possible to ask questions about communications tariff
preferences for "educational" institutions. But in a Knowledge Society,
what is NOT educational? The potential for individual learning inherent
in lowest possible cost interactive connectivity is obvious. The basis
for deciding preferential tariffs based on "educational" purposes is not
clear at all. We don't yet know which new structures of connectivity
will have the biggest pay-off in terms of learning, thinking and knowing.
6. EXPRESSING LOCAL IN THE FACE OF THE GLOBAL
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"As community networks develop and mature, they are becoming
more exclusionary, more restrictive, more like any other
organization. They begin to see themselves as providing something
for the community, rather than as caretakers of a space created by
the community. This needs to be reversed."
Jay Weston. Old freedoms and new technologies: the
evolution of community networking. Symposium on
Free Speech and Privacy in the Information Age,
University of Waterloo, November 26, 1994.
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As networks transcend geography, having a sense of community becomes
ever more important. Community is the location where the task of
thinking globally and acting locally is made manifest. The collective
question we face is "how best to bring a community on-line?" This is not
a trivial question. We should NOT see our role as bringing our
neighborhood into the Global Village. The Global Village already exists.
We must help our community adapt to its realities.
Globalization decouples more than corporations from reliance on the
people and resources of local places. What business and government are
ignoring is that globalization potentially decouples everyone. From the
experience of downsizing corporations and governments, we know that,
in the transition to a knowledge-based economy, the middle disappears.
In political terms, the middle consists of towns, cities, regions,
provinces and countries. At its ultimate, globalized decoupling heads
toward a social restructuring where all that is left is the purely global
and the purely local. But what will connect the local to the global?
Money speaks for global socio-economic aggregations. Who speaks for
relationship in the place where you live now? Community networks
provide a powerful means of action for people who want to address that
need.
We are not, and will not become, pure thought. Consciousness as self-
awareness involves physical presence in a particular place and time.
However much the Net frees us from the constraints of space and time,
we remain anchored to a point of departure. Home is where the homepage
is, but it's also the location of the off/on button. How will we use the
community net to enhance our power to know and live in the social
interaction and the physical geography of community in a new way?
It would be monstrous if, in "bringing a community on-line," we at last
severed all connection with geographic location, so that we saw our only
social reality as residing in the machine. The goal here is not to create a
community of the mind only, the infinite and virtual reality of the
planetary net. A community net must ground us in, not disembody us
from, the place where we live.
Community networking sustains community directly, particularly by
provision of new communications technologies as means of voicing
community concerns and by directly expressing the community's
telepresence. In this sense, community networks are essential social
organizing institutions in the creation of a Knowledge Society. The
essential element to ensure that community "network" development in
Canada represents "community" development is grassroots community
control. Community networks are not "infrastructure." Community
networks are caretakers of electronic public space created BY the
community, not providers of something FOR the community.
7. EXPRESSING CULTURE AS IDENTITY, NOT COMMODITY
*******************************************
"What is extraordinary is not how digital technology has compelled
us toward a fundamental cultural reevaluation, but rather how that
technology can - if we use it right - express so eloquently an
omnipresent reevaluation already in being."
Richard Lanham. The electronic word:
democracy, technology, and the arts.
University of Chicago Press 1993, 84.
*******************************************
Community networks are Canadian culture made manifest. Canada's
presence in community networks on the Net is a global expression of
Canada's role and identity in cyberspace. It is a picture of ourselves
being ourselves, for ourselves, but that picture is also available for any
of our netsurfing visitors. As a country, if we do this first and we do
this better than anyone else, our experience of what happens in the
transition to a Knowledge Society does become a key global export
"commodity." But the expression of our experience of our culture is more
than that.
A grassroots community development movement directly affects the
social integration of Canadian communities through sustaining the
pluralism of community for a variety of voices. The concept of a cultural
mosaic is fundamental to Canada's chosen self identity. Community
networks provide a pluralistic umbrella that serves the communications
and relational needs of ethnic and minority communities directly.
The Information Highway Advisory Council sees culture only in the
context of commodity, as only "content-based products and services." But
ultimately culture is about identity. It's about people's right to say who
they are, to tell their own stories, ie to define themselves for
themselves. What is in community networks IS an expression of
Canadian culture. As the Net sustains our intensified relationship, the
Net becomes one of the best places to see how we are living our lives.
A community net is OUR electronic public space on the Net (cyberspace),
the "place" where we do OUR thing. Our presence on the net interacting
with each other creates as a by-product our contribution to the global
net. Contributing this dynamic picture of local "culture" is an important
part of civic responsibility in a Knowledge Society. The act of creating a
community net makes all its participants citizens of cyberspace as well
as citizens of a set of geographic locations. This is an essential element
in defining what it is that a community net actually does. Anyone
providing only Net access, without counterbalancing it with a local
content site, is "strip mining" the Internet.
8. BEING INTERACTIVE MEANS TALKING BACK
************************************************
"Video-on-demand and home shopping require extremely high
downstream bandwidth (from service provider to user) but only a
trickle of upstream capacity (to relay simple commands back from
user to the giant servers that will deliver movies and L.L.Bean
catalogs. Industry will build these highly asymmetrical systems
because they are vastly cheaper and easier to create and manage
than fully interactive systems...If industry defines shopping,
gambling, advertising and entertainment as the primary purpose of
interactive networks, communication and community may not grow
as naturally as people seem to expect."
Charles Piller. DreamNet: consumers want more than
TV overload from the information superhighway - but
will they get it? Macworld, October 1994, 5,7.
************************************************
We must speak out in defense of maximum interactivity. Business and
government only have an interest in broadband channel capacity into the
home. Their first priority is for systems with a limited response
capacity built into the return channel. This is because they see citizens
only in the guise of consumers of electronic goods and services. For
reasons of cost, they hope to limit the return channel to mean our option
to hit the "buy-icon" in reply. It's our responsibility to ensure that every
citizen can talk back in the same volume that they are talked at.
Community networks advocate interactivity in every direction, not just
inbound channels.
Bandwidth matters because computer mediated communications
converges senders and receivers. In Computer mediated communications,
the distinction between senders and receivers is almost meaningless.
The community IS the system, not its user. As the Net evolves, the
software becomes the primary component of the communications media
that sustains community within it. A bit of grammar may help to
illustrate this:
The active voice is the Internet voice. It would say,
"The community uses the technology."
The passive voice is the voice of traditional
system design. It would say,
"The technology is delivered (by someone who owns it)
to the community as end-user."
Computer mediated communications converges conduit and content. In
regulating telecommunications, a distinction is made between the
carrier of a signal and the content of a signal. The telephone company is
a utility that allows me to talk but it does not ordinarily interfere with
what I say. In the same sense, the hardware and software of a
community network is the utility, the conduit, that allows for
connections among people and organizations, whereas the volunteer
subcommittees and huge group of information providers is the catalyst
for the content that is discussed. Then there's that problem of
netiquette. The separation of carrier and content in the telephone
analogy does not hold.
Attempts to classify community networks so they fit broadcast or
telecommunications regulatory categories don't work. Do community
networks broadcast? Are they souped up phone services? Are they
carriers of communications signals? Are they content producers,
creating the communications that get carried? Are they Internet access
providers? The answer to every one of these questions is Yes, and more.
They are on-going conversations surrounding areas of special interest.
They sustain directed conversation over time within boundaries set by
the topic of concern. As concrete examples of new media in action they
don't fit existing regulations.
9. FREE HAS A PRICE
************************************************
"The structural changes required to transform Canadian society
into an information based economy requires a reaffirmation of the
concept of universal access, a redefinition of what this will need
to include, and a fair method of financing this basic requirement
for all Canadians. Although we have not determined specific
rating structures and financing mechanisms, it is clear that any
form of usage sensitive pricing or distance sensitive pricing is
detrimental to the FreeNet model."
Jay Weston. National Capital FreeNet Comment on the
CRTC Review of Regulatory Framework, Telecom
Public Notice CRTC 92-78, November 25, 1993.
************************************************
The war between cable, phone and all other providers of connectivity is
not of interest to community networks. But bandwidth capacity and cost
of connectivity IS of interest. Since for the moment the average person's
primary access to community networks is via phone lines, community
networks are creatures of the local dialing zone. Flat rate access is
essential to understanding their success and, in fact, to imagining their
future. Important exceptions to telephone access occur in the Chebucto,
Cape Breton and Toronto systems where CableTV companies provide some
experimental access routes via TV cable.
Much of the skepticism expressed by telecommunications technologists
about the future of community networks relates to the problem of
scaling up internal modem access to the same switching volume as local
dialing zones. Half of the cost of current community networks is in
phone lines. In other words, the busy signal that is characterized as the
community networks' problem is in fact a problem resident in the
communications access infrastructure that is external to the community
network. It's really a bandwidth problem.
The costs of increasing bandwidth are closely related to the costs of
switching (which track descending computer chip costs). It may be
possible to meet the demand for bandwidth without increasing costs as
technological advances in switching speeds lower the cost of bandwidth.
Because other factors are involved, - for instance, regulatory oversight -
there are no guarantees. Deregulation, new competition, and a continuing
flow of new technology can and should bring the real costs (and prices)
of telecommunications networks down dramatically. This cost decline
will also directly affect to cost of operating community networks.
The per-member cost of providing community network services is
already incredibly low. For example, in Ottawa's National Capital
FreeNet the current annual budget is $400,000 and the membership base
will exceed 50,000 people by year-end. The gross of that total budget is
a shock to the volunteers that raise it, but the actual operating cost on a
per-person-served basis is only $8.00 PER YEAR! Like the Internet itself,
and in fact because of it, community networks are a bargain.
Assuming an 80/20 rule for participation in community networking
(where 80% of the use is made by 20% of the people who could use it),
the current cost of providing operational services for every person in
Canada becomes approximately $45 million per year. If governments were
paying for the interactive connection to their services that community
networks already support (which they are not), that national cost, spread
across all levels of government, becomes insignificant. To express this
in a different way, in just one sector - education, if the 17,000 schools
in Canada were each to pay $2650 per year for the public access routes
to SchoolNet that community nets already provide and manage for free,
that payment alone would totally subsidize, not just educational public
connectivity, but the national annual cost of ALL community network
services.
A community net, by definition, cannot be a business. If its primary goal
is to supply services for profit, it's not a community network. But we do
have to make it clear that the movement is exploring a range of methods
to make enough money to pay its own way. We have to spell out that
there is a range of models running from "free" to "self-sustaining
through commercial revenue and fee-for-service," and that they are all
acceptable. We also have to spell out that the 'low cost" access to
services that we provide for social purposes has direct economic benefit.
All community network associations in Canada, as social sector
organizations, are committed to some form of universal "free" access as
an ideal. The means of achieving that ideal are varied, particularly with
respect to the questions of fee-for-service and provision of commercial
service. All associations rely on in-kind volunteer services, so that
access to computer mediated communications technology, and not salary,
is the highest component of operating cost. Although raising money is
not a big part of the motivation of community networking activists, it is
a huge part of their reality. Community networks are efficient and very
effective methods of achieving universal access to computer mediated
communications, and universal participation in the new networked social
structures of the Knowledge Society. But they are not cheap. The fund
raising scramble consistent to all associations includes seeking and
maintaining:
- donations
- project contracts and charge backs levied to other organizations
for networking services or development research
- Computer vendor product donations
- federal / provincial project establishment grants
- in-kind services from municipal governments and primary
sponsoring agencies
- telephone line sponsorship.
The following are examples of the creative range of fundamentally
different approaches to raising money:
* National Capital FreeNet, Ottawa - a pure "Free-Net" model, with
no fee for access or membership, but donation heavily encouraged.
* Calgary Free-Net - A PBS model, where use is free, but there is a
$50 charge for active membership in the association itself.
* Edmonton FreeNet - membership revenue from a $15 registration
fee is a significant component of budgeting to meet projected
costs.
* Manitoba Blue Sky FreeNet - charges for network connection
services at the level of provincial programs (eg. education) and
communities.
* Halton Community Net - has grown a platform with sufficient
infrastructure to sustain public access through cooperatively
meeting the direct internal networking needs of a large group of
municipal, educational and public service agencies.
* Telecommons Development Group / FreeSpace, Guelph - charges
for parallel commercial space, gateways, and value added service
in order to sustain free access in autonomous community-based
FreeSpaces.
* Kingston Community Network plans to partner with a commercial
Internet service provider. They will outsource technology
infrastructure and management, leaving them free to concentrate
resources on developing community oriented content.
Sharing experience gained from applying these models, and documenting
acceptable funding methods that achieve self-sustaining growth, is a
critical issue for the Canadian community networking movement. The
chapter on funding in the national "cookbook" on how to grow a
community network is a matter of urgent importance. But, remembering
that all operating community networks are new, it also seems important
to encourage and support experimentation with a range of models. The
criteria for success in funding is not just meeting costs. It's
achievement of the ideals of universal free access to basic local
networked communications services and universal participation in social
opportunity via grassroots organization.
10. UNIVERSAL PARTICIPATION AND EQUITY OF OPPORTUNITY
************************************************
"It's given me a life beyond what I had in real life. What more
could you ask for?"
Dave Goswitz. Interviewed by CBOT (CBC - TV) News,
National Capital FreeNet Second Birthday Party,
Ottawa City Hall, January 31, 1995.
************************************************
************************************************
"Not to equivocate, I firmly believe the information highway is a
road to increased social equality."
David Sutherland. Chairman of the Board,
National Capital FreeNet. Ottawa Citizen,
November 13, 1994, A9.
************************************************
The rapid adoption of new communications technologies by autonomous
community associations represents a spontaneous grassroots
"movement." Although some provincial and federal agencies express
interest in and have provided start-up support for community
networking, governments are largely absent from this movement. On
their own, people with experience of the Internet are finding ways to
transfer that experience into their daily living. To remain "connected"
themselves, they know they must help everyone connect. By their
actions, they are transforming the concept of neighbour and of civic
responsibility. They see "community" as both an antidote to corporate
globalization and a key to individual competitiveness in a political
economy of knowledge. They are enjoying the experience of creative
occupation of electronic public space in large and increasing numbers.
Community networks are bottom up, and they piggyback on the Internet.
Conversations are open to everyone, not just to those making claims of
representation. The first design principle of a community network
should be to make sure it's true to its grassroots nature. The reality of
the Net is in the any-to-any relationships and choices that it allows each
of us to make. Any organization that supports the spread of the Net
should mirror that reality. The simple rule of thumb for the political
transformations we all face is the question - Does this action increase
the ability and the responsibility of the individual to choose, and
therefore to learn from choosing?
Being committed and consistent to a bottom-up grassroots approach isn't
easy. But how do we get equity in a Knowledge Society? If we cannot
directly affect distribution of income, we can affect the distribution of
knowledge and skills, and thus tip the scales toward greater equity of
opportunity. We can do this by advocating for the right of personal
expression as the key to learning and to full and open participation in the
new emerging institutions of the Knowledge Society.
Because government and business do not understand the implications of
any-to-any interactive connections in social terms, they pre-define the
way we will use the Net as a problem of access. The word "access"
implies a passive relation to the Net and constrains its purpose as
service. But the Net as electronic public space is much more than
technological systems for the distribution of services. It becomes the
place where we all express who we are and what we want. Of course,
some of our wants do involve exchange transactions and are therefore
purely economic activity. But economics is not all of life.
The Net, as the basis of all media of communication in a Knowledge
Society, expresses everything. In the words of Heather Menzies, it
becomes our "surround." In the words of David Sutherland, it's "the
eighth level of OSI." It is imperative that any discussion of public policy
in a Knowledge Society that encompasses the public interest begin with
anticipating how the citizens of that Society can actively participate in
the structuring of all of the institutions that define it. Ordinary citizens
are fully aware that a Knowledge Society has massive socio-economic
and political implications because they are the people who feel them
first. What they want to know is - how do they participate?
How do Canadian's talk about Canada's transformation into a Knowledge
Society? What they say and why they say it points to a very serious gap
between public, private and social sector perceptions of the
consequences of that transition. Conflicting perspectives about goals
contrast value as profit versus value as self identity in community, and
universal access to technology versus universal participation in a
Knowledge Society. We see a future society where most human contact,
to talk, to participate in public, private and commercial life, is
networked. Communications systems are fully interactive, with the
outbound traffic from your personal site, your virtual place on the
Internet, as intense as the inbound. A communications system, with
immediacy and connectability much more intense than we're ever known,
will have the objective of autonomous individuals functioning in healthy
communities as it's legitimate central focus.
The federal government has stated three strategic objectives for the
information highway: jobs, cultural identity and universal access. We
would submit that community networks address these objectives head
on. And they do so in a manner that is compatible with the excitement
generated by that prototype of Knowledge Society institutions, the
Internet. In community networks, the volunteers that participate in
bringing a community online are investing their own time in learning new
skills and roles. Community networks intensively collate community
knowledge and experience, leading to a bottom-up global sharing of
Canadian identity on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. And
community networks provide a powerful model of how universal access
to the information highway can actually be used. They don't just create a
society of consumers. They do support citizens in sustaining local
communities that better meet their needs. Whatever process Canada
uses to decide its response to an Knowledge Society, it must take into
account the transformative power of community networks.
The questions we ask define the answers we get. To speak of "building"
an Information Highway avoids the need to understand social change in
our new political economy of knowledge. It does this by casting the
question in the languages of information technology management and
engineering. But we're facing much more than a construction project.
The objective of "constructing" something fails to communicate any
awareness that the technology has become our surround, encompassing
many dimensions of our daily existence. Citizens are not present
anywhere in this objective, except as passive consumers of electronic
goods and services. Whereas, in community networks, the citizen as
participant and learner is everything. In community networks, we can
easily experience electronic public space as a commons, and therefore
experience the totality of our transformation into a Knowledge Society.
The Internet lesson is that a strategy of local people, growing local
systems, to meet local needs results in a national structure that is
robust and resilient, precisely because is open and distributed. By being
bottom-up, such a distributed structure is both participatory and
anticipatory in addressing problems of equity in local access to
KNOWLEDGE head on.
Despite all efforts to hype the Information Highway as merely
downloaded information and entertainment spectacles, the concept of
cyberspace as an electronic common slowly gains strength. But this is
not just a matter of every citizen gaining access to cyberspace via an
Internet email address. It depends on what they do when they get there.
Responsible citizenship in an electronic common requires contributing to
it more than you retrieve from it.
It takes knowledge to get knowledge. In a Knowledge Society, what we
can know is directly related to the degree of expression of what we do
know. As we express ourselves in our local experience of electronic
public space we upload a richness of texture to the totality of global
connectivity. It will be answered by an inbound flood of the knowable
that is already truly beyond comprehension. Community networks are the
best means we have in letting anyone and everyone participate in the
creation and use of electronic public space. Community networks are
key agencies for achieving equity of opportunity and learning in Canada's
transition to a Knowledge Society
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