Subject: Re: DRAFT set of principles

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 13 May 1992 08:31:02 -0700

Doug -
  I thought your draft contained a very good & fairly complete set of
principles.  I wanted to draw your attention to a few points, however.
This is more in the spirit of alerting you to potential problems that
handing out solutions, but maybe it will trigger ideas from some other
source.

>  Access to the SCN will be free to all.

I think the biggest problem with these types of networks is funding.  What
are your plans in this regard?  If you're planning on foundation funding,
some degree of self-financing will appeal to them.  Also, there are clearly
people in every community who could afford to pay to access these services,
and I think you'll need to tap that resource.  Maybe something like public
radio would work, where you CAN use it free but you're encouraged to support
it.

>  We will strive to provide access to all groups of people, regardless of
>  gender, age, national or ethnic background, socio-economic status, sexual
>  preference, educational attainment, religious affiliation, or political
>  beliefs.

>  We will strive to provide access to people with special needs.  This
>  includes both special-purpose interfaces as well as support for non-
>  English speakers.

>  We will strive to make the SCN accessible from public places.

I support all of the above.  In practice, you'll find that each group you try
to reach will (especially at first) be a commitment of scarce resources, and
so to some extent be competing with each other.  So it's important to have
a plan that targets a core of supporters and moves out from there, while
maintaining positive relations with communities further down the list.

>  We will provide the support for electronic information exchange between
>  individuals as well as information through databases and other services.

One of my favorite things to rant and rave about is how services which
support both databases and exchange between individuals make such obvious
distinctions between the two, which tends to preserve the power of large
information providers to establish the "official truth", while the rest
of us just get to talk about it.  Think about how you want this to look.
At the very least, databases should support some way for rank-and-file users
to respond to what they see in a way that's readily accessible to subsequent
browsers of the database.

In general, if I didn't say otherwise, I like it.  I thought the Democracy 
stuff was particularly good coverage of the issues involved.

This project sounds interesting.  Tell us more.
-Carl

---

From: [email-masked] (Happy Fun Ball)
Date: Fri, 15 May 1992 10:01:36 -0700

> radio would work, where you CAN use it free but you're encouraged to support

What he said.
Also, a different look at the services, and who provides them.
When I first started cruzio, I immediately assumed I would get a computer,
a bunch of modems and phone lines, and start a central service. In
other words, if you want access to these services, you have to call 
my machine.

This approach can be quite expensive, as Carl points out.

We (peggy and I) did that for a couple of years, then decided to stop and look
again at what we were doing. 

It turns out, our basic assumptions were getting in our way. Right
off the bat, the "we will provide the following services". It 
presupposes a centralized system controlled/provided by us ($$$).

When we change "we will..." to "the following services will be
available to the community", suddenly, a lot less (of our) cash
was involved with the proposition.

We wanted to see the following services in the community:

1. email
2. discussion forums
3. databases
	A. community calendar
	B. directory of community groups and government agencies
	...
4. public terminals

As it turns out, in our community, there are a number of message/disscussion
BBSes and public access UNIX systems which provide a platform for email 
and distributed discussions with an existing user base. 

So we decided to keep our system, cruzio, but to focus for a while
on networking the various systems, to connect the various islands
of existing users out there. With the advent of the network, 
connectivityof indivviduals and communities became the main goal, 
and services 1-3 above become distributed services across the network. 
Email is relatively easy because most unix systems and most of the 
pc flavors of unix mail support the standard email interchange format. 
So, all of us can send mail to each other. The discussion forums 
are also easy, using BNews and the pc flavors which sit on top of 
the forms of uucp. We are in process of developing distributed databases 
which will sit on top of the mail and news and uucp.

I guess what I am getting at is that one does not always need to "provide"
the services. In some cases, it might be possible to facilitate
the coming together of already existing resources in the community.
And, as someone mentioned at DIAC, computers might not be necessary
in some cases. After all, what everyone is really trying to accomplish
is people networking, not computer networking.

ccn