by Stephen Wilson 101515.2656@CompuServe.COM
How can the Internet benefit ordinary people and improve their quality
of life? Here is a personal perspective from Stephen Wilson, a former senior
BT manager whose career has embraced many aspects of customer service, network
and information systems strategy. He is a keen advocate of the use of information
networking to help resolve social and environmental problems.
In the past many of these initiatives were carried out independently,
often in isolation from others within the same community or similar schemes
elsewhere. However those involved are increasingly identifying and developing
links with others who have similar objectives, sharing knowledge and experience,
co-ordinating their actions and finding strength in numbers. In other words,
they are forming Community Networks.
Community networks have always existed in some form or another. However
until relatively recently their effectiveness and development was constrained
by barriers such as physical location, making communication very difficult,
not just between different communities, but even within the same community.
Occasionally people would be influenced by foreigners who travelled between
communities, trading goods and services and conveying information not available
to the permanent members of the community.
Nowadays ever greater numbers of people are able to travel between communities,
sharing knowledge, trading, learning about other cultures or simply exploring
the world around them. However this trend cannot be extrapolated ad infinitum
because it is totally unsustainable, not only because of the environmental
destruction that it brings, but also because it actually encourages the
breakdown of communities and can never be equally shared across the population.
The new challenge is to establish dynamic and sustainable local communities
within a global network of communities. Each community must be free to preserve
and enhance its individual character and culture, while simultaneously teaching
and learning via the free exchange of information and knowledge with other
communities across the globe. Globalisation must be the servant of
the local community and not its master, driven in a bottom-up manner rather
than the top-down approach of the multi-national corporation, with its inherent
cultural standardisation.
This is where evolving Internet and Intranet technology ought to help us.
We now have an opportunity to create electronic community networks in which
every citizen can be an equal partner, able to communicate with anyone else
and exchange information freely. However, the network must benefit, and
be accessible to, every member of the community, which means that they must
incorporate key features such as:
Flexible community telecentres: We need to establish multi-purpose
community telecentres by developing existing facilities such as shops, cafes,
libraries and business units, where both leisure and work activities can
be performed by individuals and groups who do not have access to, or prefer
not to, use their own facilities.
User-oriented network access software: We need a user-friendly, individually-tailorable,
set of front pages into the network, allowing users to supply or obtain
information in the manner most appropriate to their requirements. Examples
include a list of frequently asked questions, information about local goods
and services, and indexing by subject matter rather than information provider.
A successful community network will be able to learn from its users and
develop personalised solutions to their requirements.
However this raises questions about the ownership and management of the
different components of the network, and hence the need for perhaps the
most important issue to be resolved:
An open and democratic regulatory framework: It is essential that
all community members have an equal voice in the development and use of
the community network. For this reason we need to agree a democratic regulatory
and legal framework to control the ownership and management of each aspect
of the network, not just hardware (terminals, servers, gateways, routers
and links), but also software (browsers, search engines, applications and
databases) and management processes and systems. It is inevitable that some
of these components will have to be publicly or co-operatively owned and
managed, so the sooner a draft framework is established the better.
As long as everyone - individual, corporate, NGO and government - who is
involved in the development of community networks, adopts a flexible and
open approach to the future, we have an ideal opportunity to develop the
modern-day equivalent of the old community network. Not only will this permit
the free exchange of essential community information, but it could also
act as a key enabler for renewing local democracy and tackling major social
and environmental issues.