Community Wireless -- A Technical or Social Program?
Doug Schuler Public Sphere Project (of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility)
Thanks for inviting me to this exciting summit! Your projects are very exciting and I hope that they will ultimately be very influential. I'm one of the founders of the Seattle Community Network so I'm familiar with the evolution of grassroots, community-oriented socio-technical projects. I teach "Computers and Society" at the Evergreen State College and I also am the program director of the Public Sphere Project for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. For the Public Sphere Project (http://www.public-sphere.net) I'm organizing DIAC-02 -- "Shaping the Network Society: Patterns for Participation, Action, and Change" a conference that is being held in Seattle in May 2002 (http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/diac02). This conference is intended to be a big get-together for activists, technologists, researchers, policy people, etc. who are interested in promoting democratic information and communication technology. At the very least I'm hoping that the wireless community networking community will put on a "Wireless 101" workshop at the conference. In conjunction with the conference, we're soliciting "patterns" which we're using to build a larger "pattern language" which reflects the diversity and insight of people who are building alternative communication systems (http://diac.cpsr.org/cgi-bin/diac02/pattern.cgi/).
Based on my experiences with SCN I wrote "New Community Networks: Wired for Change" which was published in 1996. I'm not trying to sell it to you because it's out of print. It is, however, on the web (http://www.scn.org/ncn) and I think that it is pertinent to your work. In the book I tried to raise the issues as to WHY we needed community and civic oriented media. I came up with six community core values which I feel may be useful for your project. (If there is ever a new edition I will definitely want to include information on the wireless movement!)
I was just at a meeting in Argentina -- the second global community networking congress -- 550 people from all over the world. People from all over the world are working on these issues. We all in this together -- if we don't hang together we'll hang separately. Millions of people around the world are designing and building inexpensive, equitable, independent, alternative media that is not government or corporate propaganda. We need to show why this work is important, how it can be done, how to make it economically viable. We need to use it and make it usable. We may even need to fight in the political arena. People working in the policy area, technologists, open source advocates, independent media producers and distributors, and people working for voice mail for homeless people, community networks, community technology centers, public access TV, etc. etc. We are working in the same field whether we know it or not or whether we leverage each others work or collaborate with each other. For example, you and other technical people are doing much of the virtual R&D for the rest of us.
But will it all add up? Are these efforts totally marginal or can they ultimately have an influence on the world? \My advice for these projects: Please don't think of this as only a technical project. It's a socio-technical project. Social and technical must work together: I've seen many projects -- like SCN -- divided -- at least partially -- by this type of schism. The technical people make sure that the system runs and they sometimes don't understand -- or try to understand -- what the other people are saying. If, for example, non-technical people don't know the difference between rev 6 and rev 7 of the latest software that doesn't mean that their ideas in other realms are as ignorant.
An observation on the process -- based on my experience with SCN there seemed to be quite a bit of chaos at the beginning and after fundamental problems were resolved things worked a lot better! There is often a storm before the calm (and then, inevitably, another storm, etc.) One thing that we at SCN did early on was to develop our set of principles. These are spelled out in more detail (http://www.scn.org/commnet/principles.html) but in general the SCN principles represent several commitments -- commitment to access, service, democracy, the world community and the future -- and something like that might be useful for wireless community networking projects as well.
Good luck to all of you! And to the rest of us as well!
