"What it is is what we make it"

Optimal roles for government and community in developing the human, equitable and empowering online world that we all want.

Gary Hardy, General Manager, Vicnet
(www.vicnet.net.au)

1. Community networking is a good thing

I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted, I’m sure that most of the people in the room believe that "Community Networking" – whatever that is – is a "good thing". Problem is, I believe, that, being humans and this stuff being so new, we haven’t worked out any widely held understandings of what sort of a "good thing" it might be. We haven’t developed a clear enough language – or maybe we haven’t had enough experience as this is all so new – to describe what is valuable, nor how we can foster and encourage the good things.

We’ve had a lot longer to decide that, say, comprehensive education, or that being able to read, are valuable for the individual and for the society as a whole. We’ve all seen the power of television and mass media, we’ve read the history of the impact of telegraph and telephone and printing – but as many commentators have pointed out, this is the first technology where we think we’ve got some sort of chance for influencing how it might roll out.

Because it is such a slippery, chameleon environment, because we can see the large players at work trying to turn the net into an entertainment infotainment advertising e-commerce click-till-you-drop medium, because it touches on issues which we expect government to be concerned on our behalf – like education, job opportunities, access to information, because this medium straddles the areas of what we think are social space, community space, individual rights, we feel compelled to try to nudge or influence this thing to evolve in certain ways rather than others.

So what are those key areas of public space that make this so important -

Information and education

If knowledge is power, then the net can be a significant tool of empowerment. Given the skills to navigate and access, the boundaries of what any connected individual can acquire are vastly expanded. Conversely, lack of access and lack of skill with ICTs is already and will continue to be a significant disadvantage in education and employment. If 90% of newly created jobs require IT skills, lacking those skills is creating exclusion from economic, educational and social opportunities. As the volume of useful stuff on the net expands, being excluded from it becomes relatively more disabling for individuals and communities.

VICNET runs a volunteer program, where people with some IT skills volunteer to assist community groups who lack the skills or confidence to publish their own web sites. The range of ages of our volunteers runs from between 16 and 70, but many are young unemployed people, and the program has been, largely by accident, quite effective in getting people into the workforce. Probably our best success story was a bright young guy who had no particular IT qualifications. He was on the dole, with time on his hands. He attended our HTML class, then started doing web pages for groups, and he did a very good job with them. A large, boring paid publishing job came in, which all of the regular VICNET workers refused to do, so we offered it to the young volunteer as a casual job, and he did it very well. Next time a full time job came up, he got it, and in a year he was assistant customer services manager. He left us recently to go to a job in a commercial IT company, with a salary package much more attractive than mine. VICNET itself started out with just 2 people in 1994, and now employs around 40 – so it has been a reasonable job creation scheme in its own right, and it has been largely self funding for all of its brief history.

Empowerment

The most basic pc connected to the net is a potentially powerful tool to change and shape whatever fragment of the world we feel most passionate about. Changing the world is never easy, but there have been some nice examples in Victoria recently of individuals who have managed to give the turn of events a nudge. At our last election, the then Premier was seemed set to win hands down, and early on in the campaign, the press were universally yawning and speculating about the next term of office. The premier established his own web site, jeff.com which in itself was an eloquent statement of his commitment to online as a way of doing business. Jeff.com had shock wave, high production values – a very slick web site indeed. A former press officer of the premier established an alternative web site - jeffed.com - which was as basic as the premier’s was high end. The staffer’s web site provided a detailed chronicle of a range of the then premier’s activities over the term of office. Each of the episodes on jeffed.com had been reported in the mainstream media, but what the jeffed.com site did was provide a memory –which the mainstream media with its focus on "news" – what happened yesterday – had largely forgotten. The web site caused quite a stir, and the media seemed to remember what it had forgotten. Questions were asked on talk-back radio which made the premier testy, stories were run in the papers, and quite perceptibly the armour of invincibility fell away. Several commentators have argued that the jeffed.com site was the key element which turned the tide. This one, very basic web site significantly shifted attention of the media and of a significant portion of the electorate.

Four years ago, a group of aboriginal women from the Kurnai people in Gippsland Victoria, set up a sewing and art group – which became Djeetgun Kurnai Women's Aboriginal Corporation. To quote from their web site -

A survey of the 44 women attending on a regular basis underscores the enormous problems faced by the women who attended. Only one had a car, two had telephones, seven had no fixed address, five were in special accommodation housing. All were long term unemployed - very few had ever worked. All lived in poverty (with a total of 70 dependent children).

The women began to make extraordinarily beautiful porcelain dolls, which were sold to raise funds for more tools and materials for the group. The group gained funding under the Skills.net program, a Victorian Government program which VICNET administers, and established a web page and an internet training program. Business is booming with demand for the dolls, generated by the web site and the publicity which the web site has attracted pushing along the sales.

Communities of interest

The jeffed.com story is a nice illustration of the power of the net because the cause and effect are immediate and clear.

The power of communities of interest sites tend to be harder to discern but are I believe vastly more powerful and far reaching. On VICNET we have over 3000 communities of interest hammering away, usually powered by one or two impassioned individuals, each of which is making its own contribution in connecting people, informing them, supporting them, organising information, sustaining and supporting isolated members, rallying the troops. The role of the net in providing a new voice and a new consciousness for previously marginalised and disempowered groups has been profound. Its been an extraordinary tool for harnassing the inherent good will of human beings.

No one, as far as I know, has come up with a very good way of showing the value of what these groups achieve, which is a pity, as there is no doubt they are enormously effective in delivering benefits to their members – much more effective than many well-meaning government run sites.

Consider the following two sites.

Exhibit a - A government department has put over $1 million into a health information site, which conforms to the best meta-data and indexing standards, yet it is far from easy to actually find what content it does contain. What information has been vetted by some many committees and is so general, it is often close to useless. A huge range of quite common conditions do not rate a mention.

Exhibit b – My wife and I were surprised by the appearance of our son Vincent 13 weeks before his due date. This was a deeply traumatic experience, made more so when we were told that Vincent would have cerebral palsy (neither prematurity nor cerebral palsy rate a mention on the government funded health information site, by the way. When our son Vincent was one we created a web page for him, as a sort of celebration that he and we had survived. We put our email address on the bottom, and almost immediately we started receiving mail from other parents with premature babies, desperate for information and for someone to talk to about what they were going through. We set up a mailing list, which now has over 600 members world wide, we’ve established an online forum which gets over 100 postings per day. Out of the discussions we’ve got a group which publish a print out newsletter, we’ve created and published a number of Frequently Asked Questions about a range of topics of concern to parents of premature babies, and we’ve helped organise two international conferences trying to get health professionals and parents to talk to one another, and, yes, we’ve even managed to meet people who live in our own location and have face to face meetings. Collectively, we’ve helped and informed probably thousands of people going through the worst experience of their lives. Apart from the space on VICNET, we’ve done this with no government support.

Which exhibit represents the best "value", which exhibit represents the greater contribution to the general wellbeing of the society in which we live? The potential contribution of online communities of interest to the ongoing well being of our civil society is profound but unfortunately it is largely outside the thinking of most models that inform governments priorities.

Communication

Having reasonable access to a telephone, a postal service and broadcast services are generally accepted as basic rights in advanced societies. Having reasonable access to email, discussion forums and other interactive environments should be considered equally fundamental. VICNET runs a guestbook which is always interesting reading, and is rich with illustrations as to how important on a fundamental human level access to this technology can be. Here is a recent posting:

I am looking for a guy from STRAVENGER NORWAY.

His name is JON or JOHN and he play's hockey.(blue eyes,)

I met him in CANADA. To be more specific MINNEDOSA, MANITOBA,classic rock festival July 31 1999. We watched Lennard Skinnard together, and you spent the night in my tent.

I need to find you.

APRIL from CANADA

April <….@hotmail.com>

Regina, Canada - Sunday, at 13:13:37 (EST)

Why April from Canada is looking for Jon from Norway on a Victorian online guest book one can only speculate, but imagine how terrible it would be if Jon didn’t have access and couldn’t reply.

2. Government Policy Approaches

In Victoria, Australia, like you in NZ, we've just had a change of government, which in many respects represented a fundamental change in philosophical approach. There are of course all sorts of paradoxes inherent in the way political system works. We've moved from a State Liberal government with a predilection for privatising public assets and an emphasis on the economic layer, to a Labor government with an emphasis on inclusion and consultation, judicious expansion of services, and a sharp focus on fiscal restraint. We’ve got a Federal government in the process of privatising our major telecommunications carrier but ready to provide large volumes of project dollars to rural projects to redress telecommunications inequities. All layers of government are seriously worried about the ballot box power of the rural electorates.

Working under a number of policy frameworks simultaneously and sequentially gives some perspective on the ways that governments approach the issues of online access for communities.

I've noted three basic approaches or underlying arguments:

1. Equity/access - very much in the foreground with our current government - the notion that enabling everyone - across all levels of society and across all geographic areas - to have reasonable levels of access to online technologies is something worthwhile in its own right and should be striven for.
   
   
2. Government Online service delivery - there are potential cost benefits in Government online service delivery - but a reasonable level of techological literacy and access are necessary components. Government thinking tends to be supply side, but there is a recognition that some level of skill and access is required. At its most bean counting, the thinking centres around the number of publications and pamphlets that need not be printed, around that ominous phrase "disintermediarisation" whereby government calculates how many fewer public servants would be needed if processes like renewing your driver’s licence could be re-engineered as an online electronic data interchange rather than as a hard copy form filling exercise. Government Online thinking finds its most worthy expression in aspirations for electronic democracy – in the desire to use the communication capacities of the internet to build new consultative forums and channels.
   
   
3. Economic development - participation in the knowledge economy is a key driver of future prosperity and quality of life for the whole community. Encouraging community participation is a fundamental building block as it helps grow the skills base required, and it helps create the local marketplace. At its worst, emphasis is primarily upon critical mass, and developing market advantage faster than competitors. If 30% of the population never get a chance to get online, well, bad luck.
   
   
4. Rural panacea. An optimistic or cyncial subset of argument three runs as follows: Rural communities are in decline with the slump in world commodity prices, the general withdrawal of services from rural areas. Online means "geography dissolves". Provision of access to the global network will somehow re-invigorate declining regional economies. (In Australia, electoral power of rural vote means that 3.1 has got a very good run indeed.)

Of course, the three are not hard boundaries and they intersect. A wise government is obviously concerned with maximising the economic opportunities for all of its citizens so a concern for economic development is also a concern for equity. Electronic democracy has a limited future if large sections of the community are significantly under-represented.

How these broad concerns are translated into action varies enormously within Australia. E-commerce and economic development seem to have absorbed much of the attention, and much of the resources, with the supply side concern of placing government services online coming second. Community networking and equity have tended to become overwhelmed within the technical complexities of telecommunications policy. Concerns about technologies themselves – what sort of digital television standard – telecommunications market issues – will there be a universal service obligation, how will different carriers interact – tend to overshadow more fundamental concerns. Government involvement in the information society, as against the information economy, has been relatively more piecemeal and disjointed. Small projects gain small amounts of funding with little hope of recurrent or long term funding. Numbers of parallel but sub-scale projects and needs analysis studies proliferate, while fundamental issues remain unaddressed.

3. A layer model for community networking

The way things work do not necessarily correspond to policy frameworks. What governments think or are persuaded to think are their legitimate spheres of activity, what they value, and how they act are all influenced by the prevailing ideologies, who they get to talk to, and what they perceive is political advantage.

We know what the big problems are:

• Lack of access
• Lack of skills
• Lack of local information
• Literacy barriers
• Language barriers
• Lack of cultural diversity
• Lack of resources to keep it all going

Trouble is that government doesn’t have quite the same list.

So how might government and community interests in the networked environment work together? As a working hypothesis, say I’d propose the following five essential layers:

Access

The access layer is of course absolutely fundamental – if access to affordable online technologies and telecommunications is restricted then any potential benefits of involvement will be correspondingly restricted. In rural Australia, access to basic telecommunications services is problematic, and access to internet services is significantly limited. The potential of the net for people with disabilities is enormous, but the design of provision of public access facilities must take special needs into account. Ideally, public access facilities need to be as fully featured as possible (all the plug ins, reasonable bandwidth, flexible enough to provide headphones or access to sound) and configured so that information published in non-Latin fonts is viewable.

The first tenets of a basic bill of citizens’ internet rights would run that

• anyone anywhere should have access to as much bandwidth as they want at a standard price.
  
  
• reasonably priced public access to the internet should be ubiquitous.
  
  
• Access should take account of disability and multilingual issues
  
  

There are a number of interesting models here. The Canadian Government’s Canada Online program has developed what seems to be a very workable model for provision of public access, by structuring a grants based scheme whereby local communities can apply for funding to provide public access. The local community must provide "matching funding" which can be in the form of "in kind" contributions, and must fulfil certain conditions - provide access for so many hours per week, keep records, be available for the whole community.

Tools and support

The true divide will come when people have access but the content has no relevance and is of no use.

Access alone is not enough (though there are some interesting stories of what simply providing access can achieve. Subscribers to the Digital divide list would have read the story recently of the "hole in the wall" experiment where a net-connected pc was embedded in a concrete wall in a New Delhi slum. "the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net." )

What some small regional communities have found is that the provision of access to online services can have a negative impact on fragile local economies and communities. Opening the local community to the world without providing a platform for the local community to communicate with itself has hurt some local businesses who are suddenly confronted by large ecommerce competitors. Lack of information about local employment prospects means people identify employment prospects elsewhere. Lack of local interactive environments means people may communicate with the affinity groups elsewhere and weaken existing community links. Without strong local focus, the net has the potential to become as one committed community networker commented recently, "a pathway to isolation" - "I realised that I’d spent all day on line and not talked to a single person in Maffra".

What has to be encouraged to counterbalance these unintended impacts are local portals – that is local gateways to local information, and the online tools for people to create their own local information. Tools for creating content using fonts other than latin font, and support materials in languages other than English, are key for avoiding that dire prediction ""The true divide will come when people have access but the content has no relevance and is of no use."

Individual local portals are appearing with varying degrees of success, often driven by an individual local entrepreneur, with a cost structure which tends to mitigate against the key role that the portal should play. Information on the local portal is often not integrated with larger regional and national information portals, limiting the potential benefits and reach of the information published. A personal hobby horse of mine is that the development of such a suite of tools, with a program to encourage the deployment and ongoing maintenance, is a legitimate and worthy role for government.

Support for the individual user, for the public access network, and for the increasingly complex networks at local level represents another challenge. Particularly in the early stages of development, and often when key technology choices are being made, technical skills are in short supply. In Victoria, VICNET has all too often found itself following in the footsteps of an expensive consultant who has ill advised a community group to pursue a costly and sub-optimal technology solution. One of our dreams and visions has been to establish a Network Operations Centre, which could provide initial advice, set up, support and ongoing higher level maintenance to public access and community networking undertakings.

Skilled user base

"While education is the great equaliser, technology appears to be a new engine of inequality."

Both past and current governments in Victoria have, to their great credit, made clear policy statements emphasising the key importance of building a learning society based on general dissemination of skills in using ICTs. It is recognised that advantage breeds advantage, that encouraging the spread of technological literacy is as important in the new millenium as free universal education was in the 19^th Century. Here some very impressive Government programs have been developed. Every state funded school is connected to the net. Teachers have had access to extensive professional development programs and to a scheme which provides them with their own lap top. The Skills.net program has funded over 160 community based organisations to provide training in basic internet skills to their local communities, with more than 36,000 people trained. VICNET runs a training roadshow which visits local groups, sets up displays at farmers field days, fairs and other gatherings, or simply sets up in the local pub. These programs target groups who are under-represented in the online community. The roadshow has been so successful that it has received substantial corporate sponsorship and is seen by government as a key method in providing training to remote locations as well as to minority communities. Another great program – Uniting Our Rural Communities – uses a lap-top and kitchen table approach in providing one on one training for rural women in the Gippsland region. There is always more to be done but the approach of building on and working with local community people networks certainly has worked well for us and the model of, essentially, matched government funding to enable local people to raise the skill levels within their community has been extremely effective.

Community publishers, managers

This is another instance where we don’t seem to have developed a language to adequately describe the concept. A key element which we have identified in all the successful community networking undertakings – both in the Skills.net training centres and in the successful virtual communities – has been the individual or individuals who usually kick of the community’s online involvement and hold the whole enterprise together. They are the people who have a vision of what they want for their community and who are ready to put in the effort and time to see that things keep moving along. We’ve had lots of web pages started and never updated. We’ve had lots of web pages started, which have grown to be significant portals for the group, with active discussion forums, mailing lists, and content generation. The key lesson is that successful online communities don’t happen, they need commitment and managing and vision.

VICNET and Skills.net have got as far as they have by, almost accidentally, attracting enough of the committed community heroes to drive the content and training. They are a powerful force. With the Victorian Government Department of Mutimedia, we are looking at ways that the key lessons that the existing online community leaders have acquired can be systematised and passed on to other communities.

Policy

As I’ve indicated, I believe that there is a real role for government in stimulating and assisting communities to get online at every layer, in ensuring sufficient public access. The barriers can be great for communities engaging with this technology, but so too are the benefits of involvement and the potential costs of disengagement.

There are many examples world-wide of government funded programs aimed at encouraging communities increase their online involvement, but how do governments decide what programs they will fund, and what drives them? Based on anecdotal evidence, government involvement is often driven by one or two individuals well placed within the power structure. This is tremendous when one is fortunate enough to live in a jurisdiction where such an enlightened individual is well placed.

4. What can we do?

Ideally, each level of the layered model should be communicating with every other layer. It is not and should not be a hierarchical model, but rather a many to many model – a rubrics cube would represent it better than a flat rectangle. Ideally the great ideas and aspirations of communities should be percolating out, using the tools and access provided by the beneficent administration, up to the policy layer which turns them into richly funded programs which loop back down into the people on the ground who want to get things done.

Can we get there? What do we need to do to get to a situation something like that? I think that this conference is a huge step in the right direction. I think what are required are clear and reasoned articulations and examples of the value that communities can deliver by engaging with this technology, and of the dire consequences of ignoring the potential are very important building blocks. Organising to keep sending the message where it might do some good is important. Organising to get more things going faster, to build that capacity and competency at a community level is important. This conference is a powerful symbol of all of these activities moving to a new level, gaining confidence, changing gear.

Of course there is a long way to go, and of course there are enormous obstacles. Say you get past the lack of skills and the lack of access and the lack of resources – there are still the media who don’t get it, politicians who don’t get it, government agencies who don’t get it, people in our own communities who don’t get it.

But what we have to do is to keep using the extraordinary power of the communication and publishing tool which is in our hands to raise the level of debate, to organise, to inform, to lead by example, to learn from one another, to help government help us to help them to help us.

The net is a tool that is as flexible as it is powerful. If we engage with it, learn how to use it, we can use it make things, to achieve outcomes, to grow environments, that are what we want them to be like, not what someone else tells us we can have. To quote good old Howard Rheingold again, "what it is is what we make it" - the human, equitable, and empowering online world that is what we want it to be.