From namioka at netcom.com  Fri Jan  2 14:01:14 1998
From: namioka at netcom.com (Aki Namioka)
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 14:01:14 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Tech matching fund.
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9801021306.A23094-0100000@netcom5>


Here is some info on the City's Tech Matching Fund, similar to the Dept. 
Of Neighborhood matching fund for Seattle technology projects.  If any of 
you are invovled with projects that might be applicable, I hope you apply.

- Aki
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The  URL for information about the Technology Matching Fund and 
other Citizens Technology Access and Literacy Projects is
http://www.seattle.wa.us/tech .

In case you wish to forward this, I have included the basic information
below.

------------------------------------------
The City of Seattle has created a new Technology Matching Fund  to foster
community projects that increase public access to computers, support
information technology training and literacy, or apply technology for
neighborhood planning and action. The city has allocated $300,000 for the
97/98 budget cycle and is now accepting applications. We also invite you
attend a community technology briefing on January 8th or 14th (see more
below). These efforts are part of a larger Citizens Technology Literacy
and Access Project. Detailed information about the Technology Matching
Fund and Citizens Technology Access & Literacy projects is posted at
http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/tech .

Small project applications (under $5000) will be accepted every other
month with a first deadline of January 20th. Larger projects have a twice
yearly deadline. For the first round, Letters of Intent are due January
20th and applications in March.

We're holding two Community Briefings to answer questions, encourage
collaborations and discuss possible projects. These community meetings
will be held:
January 8th at 7 pm at Rainier Community Center (4600 38th Ave. S).  and
January 14th at 7 pm. at Delridge Community Center  (4501 Delridge Way SW)

If you have questions or wish to discuss a possible project, please do not
hesitate to contact me at this e-mail address or at 386-9759.  I would
also be happy to send printed copies of this information if you know
someone who would be interested but does not have easy web access.

- David Keyes
Community Technology Planner
Technology Division, ESD
City of Seattle

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From steve at accessone.com  Sun Jan  4 13:29:41 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 13:29:41 -0800
Subject: Pine class
Message-ID: <199801042130.NAA09510@accessone.com>

Electronic Mail Using Pine

UWTV - cable channel 27

Saturday 1/10

8:00 - 9:30 AM
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From douglas  Mon Jan  5 16:24:50 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 16:24:50 -0800 (PST)
Subject: community networking conference in Austrailia
Message-ID: <199801060024.QAA03626@scn.org>


FYI...


> From: Ken Young <vacic at vicnet.net.au>
Subject: Community Networking Conference

Dear Collegues,

I am emailing to let you know about the Third Community Networking /
Networking Communities Conference to be held Friday 27 and Saturday 28
February 1998.  At the Victoria University of Technology St. Albans Campus
Melbourne Australia.

The conference is a must for anyone interested in in enriching communities
through accessible electronic networking.

The conference aims to bring together a diverse range of people involved in
electronic networking to learn about practical and theoretical issues in
electronic networking; to establish an on-going coordinating structure
within Australia for community electronic networking.

A preliminary program for the conference is now available and promises to
be a challenging program with well known speakers such as Dale Spender,
Julia Scholfield and Randy Stoecker.  Plus many opportunities for people
from grass roots organisations to share their experiences.  To find out
more and register your interest please follow this link:

http://www.vicnet.net.au/~vacab/comunet3.htm

We look forward to having you join us for this conference.  If you could
also forward this message to appropriate collegues or mailing lists I would
appreciate your assistance. 

Yours sincerely
Ken Young
VACIC

*********************************************************************
*	Ken Young, Manager							*
*	Victorian Association of Community Information Centres		*
*	4/136 Exhibition Street Melbourne, 3000, Australia		*
*	Phone (03)9650 5322 Fax (03) 9650 5817     			*
*	email: <vacic at vicnet.net.au>         				*
*	<http://www.vicnet.net.au/~vacab/vacic1.htm>			*
*********************************************************************

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From steve at accessone.com  Mon Jan  5 21:46:53 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 21:46:53 -0800
Subject: More on filters
Message-ID: <199801060547.VAA26524@accessone.com>

New Rules on Internet Content Fuel the Battle Over Filters

NY Times 1/6/98


Supporters say it enables parents, with one click, to set Internet
surfing standards that protect their children. Opponents are
criticizing it as a new tool for widespread Internet censorship. 

It is called Platform for Internet Content Selection Rules, or
PICSRules, a computer technology that has become the latest
battleground in the war over rating, filtering and censorship in
cyberspace. 

The consortium that sets standards for the World Wide Web last week
endorsed the rules, a standard that developers say will make it
easier for parents to adjust their browsers to pick and choose
between the variety of rating systems and filtering software being
developed for the Internet. 

The Global Internet Liberty Campaign, a collection of civil liberty
and privacy groups, however, says the rules go beyond the original
concept that many groups endorsed after the Supreme Court struck down
the Communications Decency Act last summer. Rather than just block
sites based on voluntary rating systems, they will also make it
simple for third parties to block whole domains and Internet
addresses, or URLs. 

"The fear the Global Internet Liberty Campaign has is that you are
turning over to the censors of the world a censor-friendly
architecture of the Internet. And it doesn't take a great leap of the
imagination to understand what the Singapore government, the Chinese
government or even the U.S. government will want to do with the
system that allows whole domains to be blocked out, or whole nations
to be blocked out," said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil
Liberties Union, which helped form the campaign. 

"A lot of people in the industry believe they need to move toward
this as a way to forestall further action by the U.S. government,"
Steinhardt said. "But the irony is that they are not going to
forestall further government action. They are going to encourage it.
They are going to create a road map for Congress for a system that
requires by law that all sites be rated. Or that sites mis-rated be
punished. And that is going to be a much more difficult
constitutional question than any version of the CDA or son of CDA." 

One of the authors of PICSRules, Paul Resnick, a University of
Michigan assistant professor, emphasizes PICSRules is not a ratings,
filter or censoring system. 

"PICSRules are about making it easy for parents to install filtering
software," he said. "That's important for parents, not governments." 

Currently, he said, parents have to go through several steps to
install filtering software, which can be difficult for the average
home computer user. Once PICSRules are commonplace, users won't have
to configure the software. 

"You can simply go to a Web site, say 'I like the filtering rules
they suggest,' and you click and it automatically gets installed on
your computer," said Resnick, who has set up a sample site. "You could
easily switch, so you could have different rules for your 6-year-old
and your 12-year-old."

PICSRules are already in the Microsoft Internet Explorer, but the
default is off, meaning users can use the Microsoft browser to work
with any PICS rating system on the Internet "but you have to do a
little work," Resnick said. He estimated it would be a few months
before browsers are on the market that will allow installation of the
various filters with just one click of the mouse. 

The Global Internet Liberty Campaign sent its first formal protest of
the recommendations, then just in the proposal stage, just before
Christmas. 

"It seems apparent that PICSRules have been developed in response to
calls from governments who seek a more efficient and effective
technological means of restricting human-to-human communications.
European and Australian governments, at the least, are involved in the
development of a global rating system which will be enabled by
PICSRules 1.1," the group wrote. "Mandatory labeling of content has
already been proposed in the UK, Australia, USA. The ability of
governments to restrict access and freedom of expression through the
use of firewalls/proxies will be enhanced by the adoption of
PICSRules 1.1." 

Fifteen groups signed the letter: the ACLU, the Bulgarian Institute
for Legal Development, CommUnity - The Computer Communicators
Association, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility,
Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties, Electronic Frontiers Australia,
Electronic Privacy Information Center, Electrónicas España, Human
Rights Watch, Imaginons un Reseau Internet Solidaire, NetAction,
Peacefire and Privacy International. 

But Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the consortium and founder of
the World Wide Web, last week endorsed the rules for widespread use,
essentially putting them in place for the Internet community. 

"I appreciate your concerns," Berners-Lee wrote the coalition.
"Whilst I tend personally to share them at the level of principle, I
do not believe that the PICSRules technology presents, on balance, a
danger rather than a boon to society. I can also affirm that the
intent of the initiative is certainly not as a tool for government
control, but as a tool for user control, which will indeed reduce the
pressure for government action" 

He also wrote that "one-click configuration by end-users is crucial
to the original PICS vision of diverse rating services and end-user
empowerment. Your letter suggests that the expressive power of
PICSRules is at odds with the goal of end-user control, but quite the
opposite is true. Without an interchange format like PICSRules, it
will continue to be too difficult for most end-users to set
filtering. This could lead to a tendency for users to simply rely
upon the default options provided to them. Or, it could lead to
government efforts to legislate about those settings." 

Steinhardt said the campaign will continue its opposition in letters
to the consortium's membership, which is a group of computer,
software and related companies. 

"We plan to make a very concrete response and suggestions for
changes in the rules," he said on Monday. "The response is in the
process of being drafted and then will be circulated to the GILC
membership. We expect to send our response in the next 10 days to two
weeks." 
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From douglas  Wed Jan  7 09:43:38 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 09:43:38 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Voice mail for homeless people
Message-ID: <199801071743.JAA15389@scn.org>

FYI,

Here is the press release from a Seattle orgaization that helps 
provide voice mail for homeless and phoneless people.  Their
homepage is on SCN: http://www.scn.org/ip/cti.

-- Doug


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE				contact:  Patricia Barry
January 5, 1997 					(206) 441-7872,
Ext. 150
							cvm at avoice.com
							

Community Voice Mail To Get Biggest Working Assets Long Distance
Donation in History

Imagine trying to find work or housing or staying in touch with
 loved ones without a phone.  


SEATTLE --  Seattle-based Community Technology Institute (CTI), creator
of Community Voice Mail (CVM), will receive more than $100,000 donated
by Working Assets Funding Service.

Working Assets, the San Francisco-based long-distance telephone and
credit card company, asks customers to "round up" their telephone bills
for donations to causes they select.  Through a special appeal for
Community Voice Mail, Working Assets generated the largest round-up
donation in the company's 11-year history.

Specifically, the donation will go to Community Technology Institute,
which provides training and technical support for replicating Community
Voice Mail across the nation.  CTI will use the money to support and
strengthen the Community Voice Mail Federation, which now serves more
than 20,000 poor and homeless people in 26 U.S. cities, including
Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, Detroit, and
Boston.

"This donation shows that there's a tremendous amount of support for
helping people to help themselves.  We've worked hard to give the
homeless and phoneless a way to connect themselves to jobs and services
by using voicemail technology.  Community Voice Mail works extremely
well, and the donation from Working Assets will spread this access even
further" said Bard Richmond, Chair of CTI Board of Directors and
Chairman and CEO of Active Voice Corporation.

Community Voice Mail operates through community-owned computers that
mimic home answering machines, enabling clients to receive calls back
from potential employers and landlords.  They systems are made possible
in part by software and hardware donations from Active Voice and
Dialogic Corporations.

In 1993, Community Voice Mail won a Harvard-Ford Foundation award for
innovative programs.  In January 1997, CVM leaders from 24 cities
convened in Seattle to form the National Community Voice Mail
Federation, the only providers of basic telecommunications for people
who are poor or homeless in this country.

In 1997 alone, more than 12,000 people met goals of finding employment
and housing, receiving health care and social services, as well as
creating a safe haven from domestic violence.  Case managers in social
service agencies report that Community Voice Mail can cut in half the
amount of time they spend helping clients get back on their feet.

-end-
	
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From douglas  Wed Jan  7 10:15:31 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 10:15:31 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Ooops
Message-ID: <199801071815.KAA24300@scn.org>



A minor correction to the press release I sent out.  Their web site
is at http://www.cvm.org -- *not* on SCN.  Their original web site
was on SCN but they've now migrated to their own system.

-- Doug

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From jimh at scn.org  Thu Jan  8 23:10:29 1998
From: jimh at scn.org (Jim Horton)
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 23:10:29 -0800 (PST)
Subject: SCN Drop-in Help Center
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980108225114.18802A-100000@scn>

If you've been waiting for an opportunity to do some real, hands-on help
for SCNA, here it is.  We have scheduled  Tuesday nights from 7:00-9:00 PM
for our SCN Drop-in Help Center at the Garfield Community Center at 23rd
and Cherry. (Easy bus access)

We would like to get 2 or 3 volunteers for each session, so don't worry
too much if you don't feel experienced enough, we can schedule you to work
with someone else who might be a little further down this road we're all
on. 

If you can spare couple hours on Tuesday nights, get in touch with Rich
Littleton (be718 at scn.org) as soon a possible. Sessions start next Tuesday,
the 13th, and we may have room for you then. Feel free todrop an note to
Rich or me if you have any questions.

thanks,

Jim
--

Jim Horton
jimh at scn.org                       Seattle Community Network


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From steve at accessone.com  Thu Jan  8 23:25:52 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 23:25:52 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web
Message-ID: <199801090726.XAA18809@accessone.com>

Homeless Left Out of the Digital Revolution

NY Times 1/9/98


Like homesteaders who flooded the American West during the nation's
expansion, Americans are building communities in cyberspace. The
foundations for some of these communities are being laid by
well-capitalized corporations like GeoCities that provide virtual
homesteaders tools and virtual real estate for building online
homes. And some of the virtual homesteading is part of a phenomenal
explosion of grassroots networking, publishing and connectivity that
the Internet allows. 

But among the many things that set apart cyberspace from real space
is the ease with which cyberspace communities can merely make invisible
those members of the virtual society who don't conform to netiquette
or don't fit the profile the community seeks to engender. 

And ironically, in a universe built metaphorically around the notion
of "home"-pages and virtual architecture, the homelessness that plagues
real space environments magically disappears. 

Walk around downtown San Francisco - the real world urban center of
Silicon Valley - and you'll see tremendous physical evidence of lives
wracked by the problems of homelessness. Visit most of the Net's
vaunted virtual communities and you'll see precious little evidence
of a world in which a home is hard to come by. 

Enter Michael Rennick, a graduate student in emerging cultural
studies at Columbia University in New York. While researching a
project on graffiti, Rennick hit upon an idea: He would give
disposable cameras to homeless people living on the streets of New
York and ask them to chronicle some moments, spaces or people in
their lives. Coupled with a transcription of an extended interview
with each homeless person, the results would be posted on the Web. 

The result of Rennick's effort is a site called Vagrant Gaze
(http://www.perfekt.net/~vagrant/homeless.htm). It's got the
do-it-yourself look and feel of early Web projects. The design is low
tech, the interview transcriptions could use a good proof reading.
But thanks to the technological breakthroughs that lead to the
disposable camera, portable tape recorders and the Web, the site
brings to the public the sensibility of people historically
disconnected from access to media. 

"I kind of feel like the site's not mine," Rennick said. The site
really belongs to the homeless folks whose photos and stories form the
core of the site. So far Rennick has posted the work of four men. 

Perhaps the most evocative of the photos were taken by Michael
Hartman, a veteran of special post-war operations in Cambodia,
according to the accompanying interview. The pictures, taken in
August, provide a homeless man's eye view of Manhattan - a man
sleeping on old cardboard in behind a wrought-iron gate like bars on a
jail cell; a shot of a gum-stained street corner where Michael sat,
his cat curled up near his back pack, the photographer's shadow just
visible at the bottom of the picture. 

Also interesting are the photos of Kevin King - instead of being dark
and brooding they're bright, cheery and full of local shopkeepers. 

"In a way you have a population of people who are not involved in
this discourse of information technology at any level," Rennick said.
"At the same time that it incorporates them into this conversation,
it transforms them from a object into a subject." 

In fact, Rennick's work is not the first in cyberspace to address
homelessness in physical space. The photographer Margaret Morton who
began chronicling in photography the handmade shanties built by the
homeless, posted her work on the Internet in 1996 as an extension of
work for CD-ROM. The Austin Chronicle, an alternative newsweekly in
Texas, published an interactive exhibit of stylized photos of life
among homeless street kids called Gutter Tribe by Jana Birchum. In
1996 another photographer, Mary Lou Uttermohlen, published Structure
out of Chaos on the Web, a collection of documentary photos and text
about life in shantytowns. 

Dozens of street newspapers maintain an online presence, some of
which publish first-person accounts and essays by homeless men and
women. More than 100 homeless advocacy organizations maintain sites
on the Web, at least one of which, the National Coalition for the
Homeless's site, contains tales of homeless people in Seattle. There
are discussion on homelessness, the most prominent of which is hosted
by Communications for a Sustainable Future, begun as a bulletin board
by Don Roper, an economics professor in Colorado. 

There's even the online journal of Kalem Kazarian, a student at
California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, who has
spent the past year posting journal entries and religious poetry drawn
from a planned year of travels among the nation's homeless on his
Homeless Ministries site. 

But Rennick's site is different, bringing something new to the
Internet by allowing homeless people to have their own unfiltered
voices. "It's a good example of the way in which the Internet can be
a democratic institution," he said. 

For now Rennick's site remains a hobby or something more. "It's
almost like I have to do it," he said. "It's chosen me somehow to do
it." 

But Rennick said he'd love to be able to make the work something
more formal. And for a medium often hailed as being a great leveler
and democratizer, it may well be off the beaten track of works like
Vagrant Gaze that hint at the medium's promise and bring a sense of
America's real community life to this budding digital facsimile.
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From femme2 at scn.org  Fri Jan  9 14:46:51 1998
From: femme2 at scn.org (Lorraine Pozzi)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 14:46:51 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <199801090726.XAA18809@accessone.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109143741.23527B-100000@scn>

On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, Steve Hoffman wrote:

Interesting.  Seattle has one of the most active groups of homeless
in cyberspace.  Check out Real Change on the Web -- www.speakeasy.org/
realchange.  Read about Anitra Freeman in the Times, Dec. 26, 1997.
Anitra was briefly active in SCN but has found a better deal at
Speakeasy.  Her Web pages have won several awards.  There are quite
a few folks on a couple of international homeless lists. 

Dr. Wes and Anitra also participated in the DIAC conference -- it
was a very lively workshop.

Several transitional housing sites -- one step up from the emergency
shelters -- give their residents access to computers.  Most do NOT
have modems and phone lines.  

On a personal note -- when I was in the Seattle Public Library last
week, I ran into three homeless/formerly homeless people who 
stopped to chat about computer stuff.  

We could be doing a lot more -- and maybe the City's Technology
grant will do just that.  But I'd guess Seattle is one of the
more responsive cities in providing Internet access to the
homeless.

Lorraine


> Homeless Left Out of the Digital Revolution
> 
> NY Times 1/9/98
> 
> 
> Like homesteaders who flooded the American West during the nation's
> expansion, Americans are building communities in cyberspace. The
> foundations for some of these communities are being laid by
> well-capitalized corporations like GeoCities that provide virtual
> homesteaders tools and virtual real estate for building online
> homes. And some of the virtual homesteading is part of a phenomenal
> explosion of grassroots networking, publishing and connectivity that
> the Internet allows. 
> 
> But among the many things that set apart cyberspace from real space
> is the ease with which cyberspace communities can merely make invisible
> those members of the virtual society who don't conform to netiquette
> or don't fit the profile the community seeks to engender. 
> 
> And ironically, in a universe built metaphorically around the notion
> of "home"-pages and virtual architecture, the homelessness that plagues
> real space environments magically disappears. 
> 
> Walk around downtown San Francisco - the real world urban center of
> Silicon Valley - and you'll see tremendous physical evidence of lives
> wracked by the problems of homelessness. Visit most of the Net's
> vaunted virtual communities and you'll see precious little evidence
> of a world in which a home is hard to come by. 
> 
> Enter Michael Rennick, a graduate student in emerging cultural
> studies at Columbia University in New York. While researching a
> project on graffiti, Rennick hit upon an idea: He would give
> disposable cameras to homeless people living on the streets of New
> York and ask them to chronicle some moments, spaces or people in
> their lives. Coupled with a transcription of an extended interview
> with each homeless person, the results would be posted on the Web. 
> 
> The result of Rennick's effort is a site called Vagrant Gaze
> (http://www.perfekt.net/~vagrant/homeless.htm). It's got the
> do-it-yourself look and feel of early Web projects. The design is low
> tech, the interview transcriptions could use a good proof reading.
> But thanks to the technological breakthroughs that lead to the
> disposable camera, portable tape recorders and the Web, the site
> brings to the public the sensibility of people historically
> disconnected from access to media. 
> 
> "I kind of feel like the site's not mine," Rennick said. The site
> really belongs to the homeless folks whose photos and stories form the
> core of the site. So far Rennick has posted the work of four men. 
> 
> Perhaps the most evocative of the photos were taken by Michael
> Hartman, a veteran of special post-war operations in Cambodia,
> according to the accompanying interview. The pictures, taken in
> August, provide a homeless man's eye view of Manhattan - a man
> sleeping on old cardboard in behind a wrought-iron gate like bars on a
> jail cell; a shot of a gum-stained street corner where Michael sat,
> his cat curled up near his back pack, the photographer's shadow just
> visible at the bottom of the picture. 
> 
> Also interesting are the photos of Kevin King - instead of being dark
> and brooding they're bright, cheery and full of local shopkeepers. 
> 
> "In a way you have a population of people who are not involved in
> this discourse of information technology at any level," Rennick said.
> "At the same time that it incorporates them into this conversation,
> it transforms them from a object into a subject." 
> 
> In fact, Rennick's work is not the first in cyberspace to address
> homelessness in physical space. The photographer Margaret Morton who
> began chronicling in photography the handmade shanties built by the
> homeless, posted her work on the Internet in 1996 as an extension of
> work for CD-ROM. The Austin Chronicle, an alternative newsweekly in
> Texas, published an interactive exhibit of stylized photos of life
> among homeless street kids called Gutter Tribe by Jana Birchum. In
> 1996 another photographer, Mary Lou Uttermohlen, published Structure
> out of Chaos on the Web, a collection of documentary photos and text
> about life in shantytowns. 
> 
> Dozens of street newspapers maintain an online presence, some of
> which publish first-person accounts and essays by homeless men and
> women. More than 100 homeless advocacy organizations maintain sites
> on the Web, at least one of which, the National Coalition for the
> Homeless's site, contains tales of homeless people in Seattle. There
> are discussion on homelessness, the most prominent of which is hosted
> by Communications for a Sustainable Future, begun as a bulletin board
> by Don Roper, an economics professor in Colorado. 
> 
> There's even the online journal of Kalem Kazarian, a student at
> California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, who has
> spent the past year posting journal entries and religious poetry drawn
> from a planned year of travels among the nation's homeless on his
> Homeless Ministries site. 
> 
> But Rennick's site is different, bringing something new to the
> Internet by allowing homeless people to have their own unfiltered
> voices. "It's a good example of the way in which the Internet can be
> a democratic institution," he said. 
> 
> For now Rennick's site remains a hobby or something more. "It's
> almost like I have to do it," he said. "It's chosen me somehow to do
> it." 
> 
> But Rennick said he'd love to be able to make the work something
> more formal. And for a medium often hailed as being a great leveler
> and democratizer, it may well be off the beaten track of works like
> Vagrant Gaze that hint at the medium's promise and bring a sense of
> America's real community life to this budding digital facsimile.
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> .	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
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> END
> 

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From cebjr at webtv.net  Fri Jan  9 15:03:34 1998
From: cebjr at webtv.net (Charles Barb)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 15:03:34 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web
Message-ID: <199801092303.PAA26198@mailtod-121.bryant.webtv.net>

I'm responding to what appears to be an interesting NY Times article
about the homeless and the internet.  My question is: wasn't someone
recently thrown out of scn for distributing copyrighted newspaper
articles to scn lists?  Believe it was even this list.  Am I wrong?

Charlie Barb                      bc639 at scn.org
Phone/FAX:206-236-1990
4548 89 Ave SE, Mercer Island, WA  98040
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From steve at accessone.com  Fri Jan  9 15:16:03 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 15:16:03 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <199801092303.PAA26198@mailtod-121.bryant.webtv.net>
Message-ID: <199801092316.PAA09960@accessone.com>

> I'm responding to what appears to be an interesting NY Times article
> about the homeless and the internet.  My question is: wasn't someone
> recently thrown out of scn for distributing copyrighted newspaper
> articles to scn lists?  Believe it was even this list.  Am I wrong?

Yep, I believe you're wrong about that.
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From anitra at speakeasy.org  Fri Jan  9 15:26:52 1998
From: anitra at speakeasy.org (Anitra Again)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 15:26:52 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109143741.23527B-100000@scn>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109144959.22857A-100000@eve.speakeasy.org>

I really admire the site in the article, as well as the intent of it.
But this issue is a bit more complex than "shouldn't the web show some
reality?" 

For myself, and a number of other homeless and formerly homeless
people on the web, circulating in cyberspace is one way to break down
stereotypes. "Yes, the person you have been discussing isaac Asimov
and Chaim Potok with for the last three hours is going off to sleep in
a homeless shelter tonight.  Is there anything else you want to know?"
We have a growing Internet presence: Real Change; the Homeless News
Service; the National Association of Street Newspapers of America;
Homeless People's Network (first an email list, now includes a website
with archived posts, soon to include a newsgroup); StreetWrites, a
writing workshop of homeless and low-income writers that includes a
local Seattle meeting, an online mailing list subscribed to by both
locals and non-locals, and two websites now, and posts quite frank
writing about the homeless experience; StreetLife Gallery, with both
the work of homeless artists and some of their personal stories; The
Real Change Speaker's Bureau; SHARE, Seattle Housing and Resource
Effort, has a large and growing website that includes the story, with
pictures, of the cleanup and creation of the BunkHouse, Seattle's
first shelter providing sleeping space for homeless people working
night-shifts;  WHEEL, Women's Housing Equality and Enhacement Effort,
also has their own website now, with pictures of the women and the
projects of this grassroots homeless empowerment group addressing the
concerns of homeless women.

All of these sites are contributed to by numbers of the homeless and
formerly homeless people participating in the programs, and they give
an effective demonstration of the realities of homelessness, based on
the response I've gotten from my portion of these sites.
  
I have my biography up on the web, and I am quite open about my
experiences with everything from bipolar illness to homelessness to
bookaholism, because this too is part of my own contribution to
breaking down the stereotypes and putting a human face on
homelessness, and the mentally ill, and even on computer geeks and
left-wing activists.

But some people who are homeless find that one of the advantages of
the Internet is that they *don't* have to announce their
socio-economic status.  It isn't visible, and they *can* blend into a
wider community and feel at home.  That is perfectly valid and I
support that activity for whoever needs it.  
 
BTW, although we all want more and we will and should work for it,
Seattle *does* have one of the best computer-access environments in
the country, as well as one of the most active grassroots incubating
cultures.  In a recent list compiled by the National Coalition for the
Homeless of grassroots homeless empowerment programs in the country --
programs improving the lives of the homeless, in which the homeless
themselves have a major voice in management -- four out of the
thirty-one were in Seattle.  And they all have websites.

And two more have been developed since the list was compiled. :)

You can explore all these websites, if you wish, through my main page
at http://www.speakeasy.org/~anitra/  -- what isn't part of "Anitra's
Clony of the Web", I have links too. And if you know of anything I've
missed, please let me know!

___________________
WRITE ON! -- Anitra
Save America's Vanishing Frompers!  Support Thalia, Muse of Comedy, 
in the Site Fights!  http://www.thesitefights.com/circus/side2.htm

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From bb615 at scn.org  Fri Jan  9 07:39:29 1998
From: bb615 at scn.org (Rod Clark)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 15:39:29 +0000
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109143741.23527B-100000@scn>
References: <199801090726.XAA18809@accessone.com>
Message-ID: <199801092340.PAA29905@scn4.scn.org>

> ... Anitra was briefly active in SCN but has found a better
> deal at Speakeasy. 

Lorraine, 

   A number of good sites have found a home at Speakeasy. Can 
you, or someone familiar with how they do things, say what 
Speakeasy does that tends to help those groups along - what 
is it about Speakeasy that generally works well for groups who 
work with them - and whether SCN might learn something from 
them or adopt some of their more successful methods of working 
with non-profits?

> ... Several transitional housing sites -- one step up from
> the emergency shelters -- give their residents access to
> computers.  Most do NOT have modems and phone lines.  

   Ralph Pfister of King County Seniors Online has quite a large
basketful of medium to high speed modems, donated by a local
ISP, probably more than are needed for the senior centers
themselves. He's expressed a willingness to help SCN in general
with some of this. This past week, we set up a Boeing-donated 
486 at Hamilton House as an Internet machine, with what (if I 
can get it a bit more organized) will be a standard set of 
Internet software that can be installed on similar machines 
elsewhere. 

   Needless to say, it's connected to a commercial ISP, 
since a text-only connection to SCN is really out of the 
question there, and at most similar locations, because SCN's 
text interface is so limited and so hard to use that it would 
defeat most of the value of having a connection in the first 
place.

Rod
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From anitra at speakeasy.org  Fri Jan  9 17:03:53 1998
From: anitra at speakeasy.org (Anitra Again)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 17:03:53 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <199801092340.PAA29905@scn4.scn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109162325.22857B-100000@eve.speakeasy.org>

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Rod Clark wrote:

> > ... Anitra was briefly active in SCN but has found a better
> > deal at Speakeasy. 
> 
> Lorraine, 
> 
>    A number of good sites have found a home at Speakeasy. Can 
> you, or someone familiar with how they do things, say what 
> Speakeasy does that tends to help those groups along - what 
> is it about Speakeasy that generally works well for groups who 
> work with them - and whether SCN might learn something from 
> them or adopt some of their more successful methods of working 
> with non-profits?

I'll try to answer that directly, Rod.

For me, these were the major factors that led to me living at the
Speakeasy instead of at SCN (virtually and almost literally for awhile.)
:)

1) Web page space.  As one of the features of a standard account, I
can create up to a 10MB site. 

2) Shell account.  One of the features of a standard account; I don't
have to be anybody special to be trusted with one, and Speakeasy is
able to handle the security.
	Unsophisticated users are, at least at first (while still
unsophisticated users) quite content with a menu and even pathetically
grateful for one.  Any true computer geek, which unsophisticated users
tend to mutate into rapidly, develops manic withdrwal symptoms when
cut off from shell account access.

3) Speed.  I log on, and I'm on -- I do not have a long wait for the
log-in, I do not have to watch several minutes of messages scroll down
the screen, I log on and get to work.
	People working for other non-profits are just as busy and overextended
as SCN's volunteers are.  None of us has the time to sit around and be
patient with a pokey server when a fast one is available.  we like to
support the people who support us, but at the time when I was actively
using my SCN account, *every* time we logged on we *had* to see the
*same* "public service announcements", and when you are already
severely backlogged with work it gets OLD.

4) Location.  Speakeasy is two blocks from the Real Change; right
across the street from the StreetLife Gallery.  To go to a function at
Speakeasy, to go ask for help at Speakeasy, to use the facilities at
Speakeasy, was a few minutes walk.  To go to SCN meetings, volunteer
activities or training sedssions ewas usually a long busride.

It's also true that because of the nature of Speakeasy, as a
cyber-cafe, almost any time you are online there are people around you
who can help you and answer your questions -- not just staff, but the
person at the next terminal over is usually willing to help if you
don't make yourself a complete pest.  This is the atmosphere that SCN
is trying to create with its community computing center, and it works,
very well.

I do believe that SCN has been a major factor in creating the
accessible computer environment in Seattle.  (If you don't think we
have easy public access, try spending a week in Vancouver BC.)  I
still see some excellent nonprofit websites on SCN.  Realistically,
however, I think that for many users you are going to always be the
"onramp" to the Internet -- the place where we get our feet wet, learn
how to use the tools -- and then we go find someplace where the cars
move faster.  I don't know how much you can change that.  By the nature
of SCN, you are a network cobbled together out of donated equipment by
dedicated volunteers working for too much coffee and not enough
peanuts.  Being able to serve as the most basic entry point to the
internet for the widest part of the underserved population, *and*
compete with fully staffed commercial businesses is, I believe,
unfeasible.  I would rather see SCN focus on serving those who do not
have available choices yet -- and go ahead and let them move on when
they do have choices.  There will *always* be more where they came
from. 

___________________
WRITE ON! -- Anitra
Save America's Vanishing Frompers!  Support Thalia, Muse of Comedy, 
in the Site Fights!  http://www.thesitefights.com/circus/side2.htm




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From femme2 at scn.org  Fri Jan  9 19:09:25 1998
From: femme2 at scn.org (Lorraine Pozzi)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 19:09:25 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <199801092340.PAA29905@scn4.scn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109185650.17854B-100000@scn>

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Rod Clark wrote:

> > ... Anitra was briefly active in SCN but has found a better
> > deal at Speakeasy. 
> 
> Lorraine, 
> 
>    A number of good sites have found a home at Speakeasy. Can 
> you, or someone familiar with how they do things, say what 
> Speakeasy does that tends to help those groups along - what 
> is it about Speakeasy that generally works well for groups who 
> work with them - and whether SCN might learn something from 
> them or adopt some of their more successful methods of working 
> with non-profits?

What I have heard from a number of "migrators" is pretty 
much that they find someone who responds to them when
they need help, the ability to use the fast connection
when they want to review their work (people like Anitra
don't have their own high-end equipment and work on old
text-based terminals or borrow -- when they can -- graphical
systems, and a place where neophyte and expert can sit
down side-by-side and work together building skills as
well as the Website.

I am NOT knocking the Help desk.  They are understaffed
and overworked.  But I believe that many of the problems
on Help are related to registration problems that should
never have to be dealt with in the first place (just my
opinion, of course, I don't work on Help).  I've heard
some griping about the "trivial" problems that have been
bumped up to the board level -- that board members should
NOT have to deal with this stuff.  Again, I could not
agree more -- IF we had systems in place that were working.
Until then, I think board members should expect to have
"trivial" complaints dumped in their laps.
> 
> > ... Several transitional housing sites -- one step up from
> > the emergency shelters -- give their residents access to
> > computers.  Most do NOT have modems and phone lines.  

Ah, the big rub is not so much the modems as the phone lines.
Folks are * BEGINNNING * to perceive the value of the Web
for low-income/homeless people.  Fremont Public Association
has put in a free access point in their Aurora office mostly
for job-seeking.  I talked with Janet Barry of the Office
for Civil Rights -- she is interested in the whole access
question.  Angelines, Lutheran Compass Center, Jubilee,
Sojourner Place, the Millionair Club's Family Center,
and the Archdiocese's Housing office are
all interested in better access.  I think only Sojourner
has a dedicated phone line right now.

I'm going to call a few of them and see if they would be
interested in putting together a Technology grant for
either Ricochet modems or phone lines.  I agree that
Lynx is not the greatest -- but I've trained a few women
from Sojourner and Jubilee who have found some very good
resources for themselves.  

Anybody else got some ideas about how we might help
serve this population?
> 
>    Ralph Pfister of King County Seniors Online has quite a large
> basketful of medium to high speed modems, donated by a local
> ISP, probably more than are needed for the senior centers
> themselves. He's expressed a willingness to help SCN in general
> with some of this. This past week, we set up a Boeing-donated 
> 486 at Hamilton House as an Internet machine, with what (if I 
> can get it a bit more organized) will be a standard set of 
> Internet software that can be installed on similar machines 
> elsewhere. 
> 
>    Needless to say, it's connected to a commercial ISP, 
> since a text-only connection to SCN is really out of the 
> question there, and at most similar locations, because SCN's 
> text interface is so limited and so hard to use that it would 
> defeat most of the value of having a connection in the first 
> place.
> 
> Rod
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From bb615 at scn.org  Fri Jan  9 13:05:57 1998
From: bb615 at scn.org (Rod Clark)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 21:05:57 +0000
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109185650.17854B-100000@scn>
References: <199801092340.PAA29905@scn4.scn.org>
Message-ID: <199801100506.VAA03815@scn4.scn.org>

Lorraine Pozzi wrote:
> ... Fremont Public Association has put in a free access point
> in their Aurora office mostly for job-seeking. ...

   Does anyone have the time and interest to adopt the SCN
employment menu? A few people have nibbled at doing that, but
no one has actually volunteered, so it's getting to be a bit out
of date lately. It's at 

       http://www.scn.org/outside/employment.html

Rod
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From bb615 at scn.org  Fri Jan  9 13:20:25 1998
From: bb615 at scn.org (Rod Clark)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 21:20:25 +0000
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109162325.22857B-100000@eve.speakeasy.org>
References: <199801092340.PAA29905@scn4.scn.org>
Message-ID: <199801100521.VAA05373@scn4.scn.org>

Anitra Freeman wrote:

> ... To go to a function at Speakeasy, to go ask for help at
> Speakeasy, to use the facilities at Speakeasy, was a few
> minutes walk.  To go to SCN meetings, volunteer activities or
> training sedssions ewas usually a long busride.
> 
> ... as a cyber-cafe, almost any time you are online there are
> people around you who can help you and answer your questions
> -- not just staff, but the person at the next terminal over is
> usually willing to help if you don't make yourself a complete
> pest.  This is the atmosphere that SCN is trying to create
> with its community computing center, and it works, very well. 

Maybe after Jim's Monday drop-in SCN help center gets
established, it could be expanded so that one of SCN's many
volunteers could be there (or somewhere that wouldn't mind
having SCN "invade" it on a regular basis) every weekday
evening from, say, 7-9 PM and maybe 1-4 PM on Saturdays and 
Sundays. 

   There must be a dozens of volunteers who put in an appearance
for a couple of hours a week, or every other week, or once a
month or so. And there are lots of information providers and
volunteers who could pick things up much faster in that
environment, where people could answer three dozen questions in
the course of a conversation, with the needed resources easily
at hand. Once a month is OK. Once a week is OK. But knowing that 
it's there every day is a whole different and better situation. 

Rod
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From steven at cari.net  Fri Jan  9 22:31:41 1998
From: steven at cari.net (Steve Mudd)
Date: Fri, 09 Jan 1998 22:31:41 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web
References: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109162325.22857B-100000@eve.speakeasy.org>
Message-ID: <34B715CD.6D29@cari.net>

One of the nicest compliments I've seen on this list...
and I generally agree with the evaluation.

Anitra Again wrote:
> 
...
> I do believe that SCN has been a major factor in creating the
> accessible computer environment in Seattle.  (If you don't think we
> have easy public access, try spending a week in Vancouver BC.)  I
> still see some excellent nonprofit websites on SCN.  Realistically,
> however, I think that for many users you are going to always be the
> "onramp" to the Internet -- the place where we get our feet wet, learn
> how to use the tools -- and then we go find someplace where the cars
> move faster.  I don't know how much you can change that.  By the nature
> of SCN, you are a network cobbled together out of donated equipment by
> dedicated volunteers working for too much coffee and not enough
> peanuts.  Being able to serve as the most basic entry point to the
> internet for the widest part of the underserved population, *and*
> compete with fully staffed commercial businesses is, I believe,
> unfeasible.  I would rather see SCN focus on serving those who do not
> have available choices yet -- and go ahead and let them move on when
> they do have choices.  There will *always* be more where they came
> from.
> 
> ___________________
> WRITE ON! -- Anitra
> Save America's Vanishing Frompers!  Support Thalia, Muse of Comedy,
> in the Site Fights!  http://www.thesitefights.com/circus/side2.htm
> 
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From kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org  Sat Jan 10 09:02:33 1998
From: kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org (Kurt Cockrum)
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 09:02:33 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web (looks like an attack, really)
Message-ID: <199801101702.JAA09202@grogatch.seaslug.org>

References: <199801092303.PAA26198 at mailtod-121.bryant.webtv.net>,
	<199801092316.PAA09960 at accessone.com>

Charlie Barb said:
>I'm responding to what appears to be an interesting NY Times article
                        ^^^^^^^          ^^^^^^^^^^^
>about the homeless and the internet.

You seem hesitant about committing yourself.  Was it interesting or not?
Are you worried that the article might really be dull and boring and you
                                                 ^^^^     ^^^^^^
don't want to be caught expressing an erroneous opinion and maybe getting
overruled by your betters?  Are you a lawyer?
Or some kind of Intellectual Property Hall-Monitor??
Or an over-age schoolyard tattle-tale doing an "I'm gonna tell"?

>                                      My question is: wasn't someone
>recently thrown out of scn for distributing copyrighted newspaper
>articles to scn lists?

I hadn't heard about that.  I would have opposed it if I had known
about it.  If true, I think it set an evil precedent.

But what's *your* problem?  Are you getting ready to propose to throw
Steve Hoffman out of scn for posting what he thought was something
relevant to the concerns of this list?  If so, then bad cess to you, sir.

>                        Believe it was even this list.  Am I wrong?

Jeez, Charlie, cut us a little slack!  This isn't Intellectual Property
BootCamp, is it?  Ever hear of Fair Use?

You sound like somebody with too much time on their hands.
The sly, oily, Heepish tone of your posting is frankly quite offensive,
whether or not you are, strictly speaking, legally correct.
Although this is my personal opinion, I *hope* I speak for practically
all of scn (although that's probably hoping too much).
--kurt
 Saint Dogbert seeks out technology that has been possessed by the Demons
 of Stupidity.  He happens across a Software Developer...
 SD: I'll make the command easy to remember, like "CTRL-ALT-F4-DEL",
  and if they forget that they can just edit the source code in
  "COMMAND.COM".  Perfect!
 St. D (waving his aspergillum): OUT! OUT!
 [ from an old Dilbert cartoon, 1994 ]
 [ I wish St. Dogbert would expand his quest to the legal domain. ]
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From kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org  Sat Jan 10 10:44:15 1998
From: kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org (Kurt Cockrum)
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 10:44:15 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web
Message-ID: <199801101844.KAA11966@grogatch.seaslug.org>

Reference: <199801092340.PAA29905 at scn4.scn.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980109162325.22857B-100000 at eve.speakeasy.org>

Anitra said:
>[...]
>For me, these were the major factors that led to me living at the
>Speakeasy instead of at SCN (virtually and almost literally for awhile.)
>[...]
>2) Shell account.  One of the features of a standard account; I don't
>have to be anybody special to be trusted with one, and Speakeasy is
>able to handle the security.
>[...]

Yeah, unix does by default, and well, what FreePort does very poorly.
It's very ironic to be "protected" from the good stuff that really
serves users nicely, by a klugey simulation of an old-style BBS that
does a whole lot of hard-to-maintain non-standard stuff that easily
breaks.  In contrast, the unix OS itself (and all of its evolutionary
offshoots, including creaky SunOS and *especially* Linux), is way more
robust and functional.

Does speakeasy use Linux?  Bet they do :) :)

>	Unsophisticated users are, at least at first (while still
>unsophisticated users) quite content with a menu and even pathetically
>grateful for one.  Any true computer geek, which unsophisticated users
>tend to mutate into rapidly, develops manic withdrwal symptoms when
         ^^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^^^
>cut off from shell account access.
>[...]

Amen!  I've always thought it was a grave error to fall into this
protect-the-consumer-from-what's-under-the-hood business.  IMO it
reinforces a pernicious and unhealthy set of dysfunctional social
relations.  Everybody ought to have shell accounts by default.
At least it ought to be a menu pick on FreePort.

The philosophy of catering to unsophisticated users by providing them
with an impoverished environment with limited capabilities is more
suited to commercial consumer software vendors and shopkeepers
than something like SCN.  It tends to solidify unhealthy
dependency-type "dumb-down" style relations between providers and
consumers (not exactly "equality" or "empowerment", wouldn't you say?).

We can look all around us and see on the scale of society, the nasty
side-effects of such a philosophy.  Frankly, I think it's helped greatly
to send this society pretty far down the tube.

The tears and travail of keeping FreePort going demonstrate the fallacy
of using poorly engineered and non-robust software to "protect" ignorant
users from each other, keeping them from the robust, relatively well-
engineered unix sw that shell-users use, that *does* the intended job of
FreePort *way* better (the job of protecting users from each other, anyway),
by *default*.  Commercial ISP's have discovered this and seem to be
profiting by it.

The problems of Pine interfacing with FreePort are one example of what
I mean by "tears and travail".  None of those problems would've occurred
if Pine was just used as another unix app.  All of those problems came
from having to hammer the Pine sw into the FreePort mold, a wholly
artificial problem with artificial constraints ("don't let the users
have access to the shell").  Pine runs everywhere nicely on unix shells
all over the world without giving people problems.  

To the extent SCN has fulfilled (and is fulfilling) it's mission,  I
wouldn't say that FreePort has been a lot of help.  I think we did and
are doing that despite the FreePort obstacle.  It's the fora and the IP
activity that makes SCN worthwhile, not FreePort.  I mean, nobody
picks SCN as an IP because of the FreePort interface or sw.
Of course, I don't mean that the decision to use FreePort was a bad one;
It did get us off the ground; we did it and that's that.
I don't see how we could've acquired the experience to make that judgement
any other way.  But IMO now we know better, and if we had to start SCN
over again, I think we would offer shell access from the git-go, with
optional FreePort access for those who want it.  Or so I would hope.

>[...]                                                Realistically,
>however, I think that for many users you are going to always be the
>"onramp" to the Internet -- the place where we get our feet wet, learn
>how to use the tools -- and then we go find someplace where the cars
>move faster.  I don't know how much you can change that.

I'm not sure I'd want that to change at all.  I don't think we should
get rid of FreePort;  I think that shell-access ought to be available
to FreePort users on request.  Besides, we have to keep FreePort around
as a real, live, working example of how *not* to do things.  It should
just be another shell/application/utility, just like everything on a
unix system.

FreePort shouldn't be regarded as anything but a way to *view* the
thing that is SCN and the rest of "cyber-space" (apologies for using
a c-word), and a minimally functional one at that.  SCN is not
FreePort, any more than SCN is /bin/sh, or Lynx, or any other
user-interface.  SCN is the thing interfaced *to*.

>                                                          By the nature
>of SCN, you are a network cobbled together out of donated equipment by
>dedicated volunteers working for too much coffee and not enough
>peanuts.  Being able to serve as the most basic entry point to the
>internet for the widest part of the underserved population,

The core mission of SCN IMO...

>                                                            *and*
>compete with fully staffed commercial businesses is, I believe,
>unfeasible.

The conjunction of the 2 ideas was what I call the "Doug Tooley"
fallacy.  SCN is loose and sloppy, just the way a pro bono volunteer
thing should be.  Some of us prefer freedom to security and slickness.

>             I would rather see SCN focus on serving those who do not
>have available choices yet -- and go ahead and let them move on when
>they do have choices.  There will *always* be more where they came
>from. 

And just as training wheels for bicycles are still made and sold,
so too will we always need FreePort and Lynx.  But they
ought not to be the procrustean beds that current SCN policy forces
all non-volunteer, non-IP users to lie in, just as training wheels
ought not to be permanently attached to their bicycle.

And the metaphorical equivalent to detaching the training wheels
should be "letting scn users get shell access on request", *not*
"scn users departing for more functional ISP's".

Besides, if we had a large pool of shell-knowledgable users,
maintenance/enhancement chores might be a lot easier, because
more of the volunteers might be likely to have a clue about what
needs getting done.  They would be more like colleagues than
customers (the latter being a pernicious concept IMO).

Kudos to Anitra for one of the most perceptive posts I've seen on
this list in a long time.  It cuts right to the bone.
--kurt
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From bk325 at scn.org  Sat Jan 10 10:53:04 1998
From: bk325 at scn.org (Chris Conly)
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 10:53:04 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <199801101844.KAA11966@grogatch.seaslug.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980110105246.8264A-100000@scn>


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From bk325 at scn.org  Sat Jan 10 16:24:18 1998
From: bk325 at scn.org (Chris Conly)
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 16:24:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <199801101844.KAA11966@grogatch.seaslug.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980110162149.4109B-100000@scn>


(Sorry about the previous blank post -- can't think and type at the same
time, I guess.) 

I have to say that I agree with Kurt and Anitra about this.

Chris Conly

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From steve at accessone.com  Sun Jan 11 22:06:01 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 22:06:01 -0800
Subject: Your home page - be careful?
Message-ID: <199801120606.WAA23125@accessone.com>

It Isn't Just Big Brother Who Is Watching

NY Times 1/12/98


CHICAGO-- When Cameron Barrett taught his co-workers to surf the
World Wide Web, he never imagined what they would do with their new
skills. 

At a small advertising agency in rural Traverse City, Mich.,
Barrett, 24, was hired to teach some 40-something female employees
how to view and produce Web pages for clients. 

In a class, he mentioned that he wrote fiction. So several employees
visited his Internet home page (www.camworld.com), where they found
short stories about sex, humor, violence and estrangement: An
unnamed narrator describes killing everyone in a stark white room; a
snowman accidentally knocks his wife's head off during lovemaking.
("In the morning, the sun came out and that was the last he ever saw
of his wife or children again.") 

After six weeks on the job, Barrett was dismissed. "The owner told
me that two of my female co-workers read my fiction, got scared,
shared it with their husbands and then went to my boss and said,
'Either he goes or we go,'" Barrett said. "They thought the character
in the stories was me." 

Now Barrett, a specialist in new media, stocks groceries on the
night shift for $8 an hour, with no benefits. His former employer
declined to comment. 

And though there hardly seems to be a national epidemic of people
losing their jobs over their home pages, Cameron Barrett is not the
only person in this situation. Workers in Virginia, Texas and
California said they had been dismissed or disciplined for the
content of their Web pages, even though the pages are maintained
with their own computers, time and money. Others said they had been
ordered to modify their pages. 

Both groups said a common directive was to remove any reference to
where they work, making it difficult to publish a resume online. 

The dismissals are legal, experts in employment law say. Nearly
every American worker is an "at will" employee, meaning "you can be
fired for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all," said
Mayer Freed, a professor of law at Northwestern University. "People
say, 'There ought to be a law.' But there's not. There would be a
huge cost to the economy if every firing would be the subject of a
lawsuit." 

Although they may not break new legal ground, the Web page cases do
reveal a culture clash between longstanding, unwritten standards of
corporate propriety and the new perspective of Web-savvy employees -
the kind of workers that companies are clamoring for. 

The employees, often right out of college or high school, are
accustomed to publishing online their narcissistic scrapbooks of
highly personal poetry, photos, and a lot of thinking out loud about
sex and religion and sex and politics and sex. 

Many of these younger workers have been on the Internet for years,
comfortably saying to strangers what they would not say to a friend
at work. But now millions of people have personal (but public) Web
pages - America Online, the largest online service, is adding more
than 100,000 a month - while still more of their co-workers and
managers and parents are learning to find those pages on the Web. 

In Virginia, more than opinion is revealed on the Web site of Lizz
Sommerfield, 23, a 1996 Yale graduate and Internet engineer who goes
by "SexyChyck." As SexyChyck, Sommerfield poses for 1,000 visitors a
week in her leopard-print underwear. It's not the full-blown
nakedness the Web is known for, but she does carry ads for hard-core
pornographic sites. "I do it because it's fun," Ms. Sommerfield
said. "I like the attention."

Her previous employer, a mom-and-pop publishing company, ordered her
to remove any reference to the company, and she did, but felt
violated and quit. "It upset me that someone was spending so much
time digging into my personal Web site and reading everything and
giving it to my boss," Sommerfield said. "I didn't feel like my boss
needed to act like my parents." 

She quickly was hired at a large company with many Internet-savvy
employees. She showed the site to her employer, who also asked her
not to use the company's name. "Almost everybody at the company has a
personal Web page," she said. "I am the only person who has been
told, 'You may not tell anybody where you work.' I feel kind of bad
crumbling under society's foot." 

Companies are accustomed to dismissing employees for misuse of
computers at work. Many company policies restrict use of e-mail,
limit access to offensive Web sites and prohibit disclosure of
confidential information. Few policies, if any, directly address
personal Web pages. 

he most similar situations in the noncomputer world involve
dismissals of workers for posing nude in magazines like Playboy. Such
dismissals - of New York City police officers, Wall Street
stockbrokers, even a ball girl for the Chicago Cubs - have not been
successfully challenged. 

"It's an interesting dilemma," said Linnea McCord, a professor of
business law at Pepperdine University. "Tampering in people's privacy
goes pretty far and gives the employer a lot of power. But if you can
be fired for bad judgment for sitting in a public place in your
underwear, you can be fired for sitting in your underwear on the
Internet." 

Employees have some safety only if they are dismissed for a reason
relating to race, sex, religion, ethnicity, age or disability. Some
employees are protected by union or personal contracts that limit
reasons for dismissal. State and federal laws protect
whistle-blowers, those who refuse to do something illegal, and
workers who file claims for workers' compensation. Some local
ordinances prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual
orientation. 

There are no applicable First Amendment free-speech protections - the
First Amendment restricts the actions of government, not business. 

The employees dismissed in the Web-page cases are still free to speak
out about their cases - and they do on their Web pages. Barrett and
Sommerfield say they do not want to embarrass their employers. They
only want to warn others about what could happen. 

They were bothered, they say, more by Web illiteracy than by
corporate heavy-handedness. Particularly galling is the prohibition
against including Web links to their employers on their pages. Such
links are common in online resumes. 

As Sommerfield explained: "They said, 'Well, we don't want to give
anyone the possible impression that we endorse what's on there.' A
link is not an endorsement. You can link to anyone you want, and they
have no say in it. That's how the Web works." 

Barrett still publishes fiction on the Web. But readers must agree to
a contract. Among the terms: 

"By reading Cameron Barrett's experimental fiction, I understand that
I am able to tell the difference between Cameron Barrett's fictional
characters and Cameron Barrett, the person. 

"I am a sensible human being and do not think that Cameron Barrett is
a psychopath who is going to hunt down and kill his co-workers." 
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From jmabel at saltmine.com  Mon Jan 12 09:02:19 1998
From: jmabel at saltmine.com (Joe Mabel)
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 09:02:19 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web
Message-ID: <01BD1F38.CA4F34A0@stockade.saltmine.com>

Steve Mudd quotes Anitra:
By the nature of SCN, you are a network cobbled together out of 
donated equipment by dedicated volunteers working for too much coffee 
and not enough peanuts.
The question is, is this our inherent nature, or merely our origin?  Is it inherent in our mission that we run on a shoestring?
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From jmabel at saltmine.com  Mon Jan 12 15:12:41 1998
From: jmabel at saltmine.com (Joe Mabel)
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 15:12:41 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web
Message-ID: <01BD1F6C.875B0460@stockade.saltmine.com>

For anyone who didn't slog through Kurt's long posting on Saturday, I think he made a lot of sense.  I hope he will view it as friendly that I resend the following paragraph.  SCN should seriously consider this policy change: let everyone have shell access if they want it.  If Speakeasy can do it without it becoming a security hassle, why can't we?

"And just as training wheels for bicycles are still made and sold,
so too will we always need FreePort and Lynx.  But they
ought not to be the procrustean beds that current SCN policy forces
all non-volunteer, non-IP users to lie in, just as training wheels
ought not to be permanently attached to their bicycle."


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From anitra at speakeasy.org  Mon Jan 12 16:06:17 1998
From: anitra at speakeasy.org (Anitra Again)
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 16:06:17 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web (really about class & money)
In-Reply-To: <01BD1F6E.68AC0710@stockade.saltmine.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980112152711.28512B-100000@eve.speakeasy.org>

This is a valuable question, but not at all an easy one.

I work with several grassroots groups, and also with the Low Income
Housing institute, which was begun by a partnership of SHARE, the
Fremont Public Association, and the Church Council to purchase,
develop and manage low-income housing, starting with the Aloha Inn. As
you may or may not be aware of, there have been some rather loud
disagreements between SHARE and LIHI lately about whether LIHI has
become too "corporate" and forgotten its roots.  SHARE itself has been
accused by some more radical activist groups of "consorting with the
enemy" and being "poverty pimps" because we actually *talk* with and
work with civic leaders and corporate groups instead of just yelling
at them a lot. (Which is rather interesting, because the government
and corporate groups complain that all we do is yell at them a lot and
we don't talk with or work with them enough.  But I digress.)

There is currently a furor among the North American street-newspapers
over whether all street-papers should be small, vocal, activist
organizations with a lot of editorial participation from the homeless
themselves, or whether larger, more business-oriented models like The
Big Issue of London, which put out an avowedly slick, mass-market
entertainment mag in an attempt to make more money and jobs for the
homeless, is also valid.  The majority of us in NASNA believe that
there is room in the world for both models, but there are extremists
who are chanting Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Capitalist to Live.

It is my belief that being grassroots and people-oriented isn't done
by applying rules and formula.  Whether you have a Cray computer in
the basement or a parallel chain of thirty recycled Texas Instrument
minis isn't going to affect how close you are to the people you are
serving. What's going to make a difference is: do you actually get out
to the workplaces and community groups and deal with what they are
dealing with firsthand?  Do you *listen* to them?  Or do you already
"know" what they need to do, for their own good?

You know you have a self-managed shelter when you do a walkthrough and
members point to things and say -- "I made that" -- "I was the one suggested
doing it that way" -- "We used to have doo-dah there but we all voted
to have dee-dah instead" -- and other indications that the shelter is
*theirs*.  Where the money came from is not a large factor in that.

I'd like to see SCN focus on developing an atmosphere where users
identify their screen display as something they voted on, something
they helped build, something that is *theirs*.  That is not easy --
giving people a democratic voice in procedures usually seems to
involve hunting them down and pulling it out of them.  

You can have a self-managed prosperous group, a top-down managed
prosperous group, a self-managed poor group, or a top-down managed
poor group.  I have seen prosperous executives who could treat
everyone, rich poor or polkadotted, with respect and human dignity.  I
have seen poor and homeless people who can't, who insist upon being
superior to and "in charge of" the other people in their own shelter.

It's not a matter of how much money you have.  But it isn't a matter
of good intentions and it automatically happens, either.  It takes
constant effort and vigilance to maintain a truly self-managed
structure, where you are always transferring skills to new people, and
you don't end up with an Old Guard who does everything and makes all
decisions because, after all, they know what evrybody needs.  One of
the dangers is that as an organization gets bigger, it gets more and
more tempting to follow "corporate efficiency", which is encouraged by
both private and public funding guidelines, and have fewer and fewer
people making decisions in order to "streamline" things.  In that
sense, going after money is a risk.

But it is just as risky to stay small and to always do what you know
is right because you have a pure ideal of grassroots activism --
without ever actually listening to what anyone else says.  The important
thing is the attitude, not the trappings. 

___________________ WRITE ON! -- Anitra 
Save America's Vanishing Frompers!  Support Thalia, Muse of Comedy, in
the Site Fights!  http://www.thesitefights.com/circus/side2.htm

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From bb615 at scn.org  Mon Jan 12 11:04:55 1998
From: bb615 at scn.org (Rod Clark)
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 19:04:55 +0000
Subject: Homelessness and the web (really about class & money)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980112152711.28512B-100000@eve.speakeasy.org>
References: <01BD1F6E.68AC0710@stockade.saltmine.com>
Message-ID: <199801130306.TAA26402@scn4.scn.org>

> This is a valuable question, but not at all an easy one.
> ...
> You know you have a self-managed shelter when you do a
> walkthrough and members point to things and say -- "I made
> that" -- "I was the one suggested doing it that way" -- "We
> used to have doo-dah there but we all voted to have dee-dah
> instead" -- and other indications that the shelter is
> *theirs*.  Where the money came from is not a large factor in that.
> 
> I'd like to see SCN focus on developing an atmosphere where
> users identify their screen display as something they voted on,
> something they helped build, something that is *theirs*.  That
> is not easy -- giving people a democratic voice in procedures
> usually seems to involve hunting them down and pulling it out
> of them.  

Anitra, and everyone who's contributed to this, 

   What do you say we take what people have said so far in 
this thread on the mailing list (minus anyone's remarks who 
doesn't want to be quoted), strip out some of the mail header 
stuff, format it as HTML, and publish it? It could be linked 
from the SCN home page. 

   So far, almost no one has read this discussion. (A few dozen 
people?) Maybe it would help if SCNA and SCN subscribers in 
general could read it too, as fodder for whatever we hope will 
happen.

Rod
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From femme2 at scn.org  Mon Jan 12 19:52:24 1998
From: femme2 at scn.org (Lorraine Pozzi)
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 19:52:24 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web (really about class & money)
In-Reply-To: <199801130306.TAA26402@scn4.scn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980112194523.25896C-100000@scn>

On Mon, 12 Jan 1998, Rod Clark wrote:

> > 
> > I'd like to see SCN focus on developing an atmosphere where
> > users identify their screen display as something they voted on,
> > something they helped build, something that is *theirs*.  That
> > is not easy -- giving people a democratic voice in procedures
> > usually seems to involve hunting them down and pulling it out
> > of them.  

Anitra -- I volunteered to be Member Services Chair because
I think that getting people to feel ownership of SCNA is crucial
to its future.  I've also felt that we need to have some better
way to communicate with our users/members.  

I'm really pleased that you are putting these issues out for
discussion.  

There has been talk of an online newsletter -- and maybe this could
be incorporated into it.  I'd prefer this to having it stand 
alone -- there is a lack of communication going * both * ways.

Anitra -- are you suggesting we might be myopic, arrogant 
bureaucrats?  People who start out doing good works often slide
into that mode -- but I don't think we are quite there yet.
Of course, we are always the last to know.

Lorraine

> 
> Anitra, and everyone who's contributed to this, 
> 
>    What do you say we take what people have said so far in 
> this thread on the mailing list (minus anyone's remarks who 
> doesn't want to be quoted), strip out some of the mail header 
> stuff, format it as HTML, and publish it? It could be linked 
> from the SCN home page. 
> 
>    So far, almost no one has read this discussion. (A few dozen 
> people?) Maybe it would help if SCNA and SCN subscribers in 
> general could read it too, as fodder for whatever we hope will 
> happen.
> 
> Rod
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> 

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From kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org  Mon Jan 12 22:36:35 1998
From: kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org (Kurt Cockrum)
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 22:36:35 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web (really about class & money)
Message-ID: <199801130636.WAA25631@grogatch.seaslug.org>

Rod Clark said:
>Anitra, and everyone who's contributed to this, 
>
>   What do you say we take what people have said so far in 
>this thread on the mailing list (minus anyone's remarks who 
>doesn't want to be quoted), strip out some of the mail header
>stuff, format it as HTML, and publish it? It could be linked 
>from the SCN home page. 
>[...]

Sounds fine to me.  I think the "Date:", "Message-Id:" and "From: "
headers should be preserved.  I include Message-Id: in there because
if people get back to me about something I said, it serves as a memory-
jogger and grep-tag that I can use to locate the original (I never
throw anything away).
Sounds anal-retentive?  I call it "machine-aided memory" :)
--kurt
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From jj at scn.org  Tue Jan 13 00:14:41 1998
From: jj at scn.org (John Johnson)
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 00:14:41 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web
In-Reply-To: <01BD1F6C.875B0460@stockade.saltmine.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980112234850.17034B-100000@scn>

On Mon, 12 Jan 1998, Joe Mabel wrote:

> [....]
> resend the following paragraph.  SCN should seriously consider this
> policy change: let everyone have shell access if they want it.  If
> Speakeasy can do it without it becoming a security hassle, why can't we? 

Speakeasy also has full-time (= paid) staff.  Does this make a difference?
I suspect so--our volunteer staff (e.g., me) don't put in the hours to
stay on top of problems. 

An even bigger difference: we don't really know who most of our users are. 
Some Freenets require id--we only require a mailing address (and some mail
gets returned to us).  If someone decides to screw up--we may have no
recourse other than turning them off.  They are certainly not loosing any
money if they burn an account.

And shell access is going to mean full Internet access.  (Even if we don't
provide it, some users will be running slirp, etc.)  This could jeopardize
our _free_ Internet access--it seems to have been provided with an
understanding that we would not be providing unlimited access.  If we open
it up, we could possibly have to start paying for it.  And have to start
collecting from our users, with all those attendant hassles. 

With you patient readers that have gotten this far I will share my main
concern:  that 'consideration' of providing general shell access is going
to be limited to 'gee, would that be nice, or what?', and not of the
consequences that could ensue.  Like having to charge to pay for full-time
sysadmins, or Internet access.  Not that this would necessarily happen.
But has anyone considered it?

=== JJ =================================================================

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From jmabel at saltmine.com  Tue Jan 13 08:38:38 1998
From: jmabel at saltmine.com (Joe Mabel)
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 08:38:38 -0800
Subject: Homelessness and the web (really about class & money)
Message-ID: <01BD1FFE.A61A7D30@stockade.saltmine.com>

Alternatively, it would be way super cool if someone edited it together & added links to present it as a non-linear dialog.  We could do both (post all the original e-mails and also an edited version).

-----Original Message-----
From:	Kurt Cockrum [SMTP:kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org]
Sent:	Monday, January 12, 1998 10:37 PM
To:	scn at scn.org
Subject:	RE: Homelessness and the web (really about class & money)

Rod Clark said:
>Anitra, and everyone who's contributed to this, 
>
>   What do you say we take what people have said so far in 
>this thread on the mailing list (minus anyone's remarks who 
>doesn't want to be quoted), strip out some of the mail header
>stuff, format it as HTML, and publish it? It could be linked 
>from the SCN home page. 
>[...]

Sounds fine to me.  I think the "Date:", "Message-Id:" and "From: "
headers should be preserved.  I include Message-Id: in there because
if people get back to me about something I said, it serves as a memory-
jogger and grep-tag that I can use to locate the original (I never
throw anything away).
Sounds anal-retentive?  I call it "machine-aided memory" :)
--kurt
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From anitra at speakeasy.org  Tue Jan 13 10:21:07 1998
From: anitra at speakeasy.org (Anitra Again)
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 10:21:07 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Homelessness and the web (really about class & money)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980112194523.25896C-100000@scn>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980113094409.24101J-100000@eve.speakeasy.org>

On Mon, 12 Jan 1998, Lorraine Pozzi wrote:

> Anitra -- are you suggesting we might be myopic, arrogant 
> bureaucrats?  People who start out doing good works often slide
> into that mode -- but I don't think we are quite there yet.
> Of course, we are always the last to know.

I do *not* think that ... entirely. :) Honestly, anyone gets myopic
occasionally, arrogant occasionally, bureaucratic occasionally.  Human
beings tend to start out trying to help people, develop procedures to
help them do that better, and wind up sacrificing people to the
procedures.  This is How Things Go.  But there are a lot of genuine,
caring, and highly intelligent people in SCN working very hard to get
things working for everyone, although they get frustrated a lot.

On a side note, I am often reminded of an observation I made in the
last days of my marriage.  Both my ex-husband and I were convinced
that *we* (single-handedly) did most of the work around the house.
We couldn't both be right.  In my more objective moments I conceded
that we might each be slightly biased.

This is one of the reasons why I like the idea of a newsletter, or any
sort of forum that improves communication between members and
departments.  As I say about our SHARE meetings -- when you get caught
up in daily emergencies, you get to a point where the crisis in
homelessness in America is whether your shelter has toilet paper
tonight. It's good to get together with the rest of the folks
regularly and get your horizons re-widened.

What I was trying to say in my previous post was that there are a lot
of forces that make it easy to become myopic, arrogant bureaucrats
-- and it takes a lot of hard work and awareness to stay grassroots
and self-managed, it is not accomplished by good intentions and a pure
heart alone.

A newsletter, an open online forum, more users involved in meetings --
all of these are ways that we could maintain a 'grassroots culture' in
SCN.

Brainstorming:

) To pull in more user involvement, how about a "User Contribution
Award"?  Have a forum where discussions like this are posted for user
comments and suggestions.  Useful suggestions that get implemented get
a colorful graphic (with an equally 'colorful' text alternative) to
post, if they have their own webpage, and a mention on an SCN awards
page.

) We could set up the "newsletter" as a webpage, with semi-permanent
articles that each have a link to a discussion area, which could
either be set up as an SCN forum or a WebApps forum (a service I have
recently discovered which maintains a forum for you, handling all the
CGI on their own server).

) We could have an webpage archive for this mailing list, accessible
by all users.  It could be sorted by date, author, subject line or
message thread. I know of two mailing lists doing that, and I had an
offer from a member of one of my mailing lists to set up the same
thing, so if there isn't anyone here who knows the mechanics involved
(I'm sure there is!) I could find out.      

I edited a long email thread into a webpage presentation once, and it
can be done.  Archives' easier. :)
___________________
WRITE ON! -- Anitra
Save America's Vanishing Frompers!  Support Thalia, Muse of Comedy, 
in the Site Fights!  http://www.thesitefights.com/circus/side2.htm

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From kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org  Tue Jan 13 15:15:15 1998
From: kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org (Kurt Cockrum)
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 15:15:15 -0800
Subject: was "RE: Homelessness and the web", now shell access
Message-ID: <199801132315.PAA20585@grogatch.seaslug.org>

[sorry this is so long, but I'm trying to cover as many bases as I can.]

jj said:
>> [....]
>> resend the following paragraph.  SCN should seriously consider this
>> policy change: let everyone have shell access if they want it.  If
>> Speakeasy can do it without it becoming a security hassle, why can't we? 
>
>Speakeasy also has full-time (= paid) staff.  Does this make a difference?

Well, currently SCN pays one person.  Can they handle two?  It's conceivable,
particularly if wage parity with current practice isn't a constraint.  Going
into the commercial market for a "real" sysadmin (the kind that make $75K/year)
is a sure-lose IMO, because they'd be gone as soon as they got a better offer,
and they'd be as much of a continuing resource-sink as rent payments to a
landlord.  As much as possible, we need to cut loose of conventional market
mechanisms, because they just don't serve our needs, and in fact, for us they
are downright counterproductive, the sort of thing our enemies (if they exist)
would design for our benefit.

On the other hand, paying somebody a subsistence wage might provide great gains.
Lots of the most effective social change organizations do that.
Somebody with a social conscience, a desire to do some technical good, and some
experience, and for whom a frugal lifestyle is not a problem, would fit the bill
nicely.  I can think of a few people who would be likely candidates, mostly
people we all know and trust.

That person would have to be able to work closely with the hardware gang
[oops, Operations Committee, so I hear].  The exact relationship might need
to evolve.

Can we get some info here on just what Speakeasy is doing? how many
sysadmins do they have?  what's their workload?  What's their configuration?

>I suspect so--our volunteer staff (e.g., me) don't put in the hours to
>stay on top of problems. 

I don't really believe that.  First of all, "staying on top of things"
is a state of perfection, not a norm.  Perception of the difference between
that, and how things "really" are is, on the other hand, evidence that
somebody cares.  A good sign.  The norm is that there is a difference.

Look, there is never going to be enough time to do all the things that
need to be done, no matter if you have an army of people.
This has to be accepted from the outset.  Moreover, it's
so universally applicable that I can't accept it as a reason for not doing
it.  It's also an issue that doesn't go away if you start paying people,
in fact that might even aggravate the problem.  We should not be paying
anybody $40/hr for 60-hour weeks.

I don't know if "staying on top of problems" is something that is successfully
done anywhere.  I know that you put in a lot of hours as a sysadmin, from a
lot of face-to-face we have.  Since you are the only member of the hardware
gang I have face-to-face contact with (meetings, while necessary, don't really
count because of their ephemeral nature), I don't know what the other people
in the hardware gang do, but I have to assume by default that everybody is
doing what they can.  So in a certain sense, this has to be taken as "good enough"
or "the best that can be done at the moment".

I think we have to cop to the possibility that for many things, they are
as good as they are ever going to be, considering the nature of SCN
(volunteer-driven, democratic, non-profit).  To make things "better" often
means giving up other equally valuable considerations, IMO an unacceptable
compromise.

I think such problems can only be "solved" by fostering situations where
as many people as possible can get the knowledge to solve the problems, and
letting native curiosity and intelligence do the rest.  This
can only be done by "learning by doing", i. e. shell-access.

>An even bigger difference: we don't really know who most of our users are. 
>Some Freenets require id--we only require a mailing address (and some mail
>gets returned to us).

What problem does "knowing who most of our users are" solve?
How does "requiring id" help that?  Are Freenets that do that better off
than the ones that don't (hard facts are needed here, not chicken-little-ish
legal qualms).

How does keeping FreePort-only access help us here?

Are you suggesting that the current system does not serve us well?
Need specificity here.  We don't *need* to know everything about our users.
We need not record their height, weight, color of hair, etc.  We absolutely
*do* *not* care about such things.  Our current registration system satisfies
all our needs (legal accountability), AFAIK.
Anything else is uncompensated labor for somebody else that provides no
benefits to us, just an energy-sapper.

>                       If someone decides to screw up--we may have no
>recourse other than turning them off.  They are certainly not loosing any
>money if they burn an account.

Well, if "turning them off" works, then that's what we do.  No change from
the current policy, AFAIK.

>And shell access is going to mean full Internet access.  (Even if we don't
>provide it, some users will be running slirp, etc.)  This could jeopardize
>our _free_ Internet access--it seems to have been provided with an
>understanding that we would not be providing unlimited access.  If we open
>it up, we could possibly have to start paying for it.  And have to start
>collecting from our users, with all those attendant hassles. 

shell acount != unlimited access

root priveleges == unlimited access

shell account == limited access

Just toss out the slirp executable, if necessary, or make it non-runnable except by
selected users.  Generalize from slirp to <whatever-executable>.
There are lots of programs already that aren't accessible to all shell users.
That's the reason sudo exists.
As far as unauthorized executables go, well, tripwire can find those.
Running SATAN informs of nettish vulnerabilities.
Running crack deals with silly passwords.
Setting umask system-wide to a sane value solves the problem of users granting
world write-access inadvertently.
Not divulging the root password to untrusted users helps.  Our current policy
serves us here (although we might want to know more about somebody who had
the root password than an ordinary user, per jj's concerns above).

Common sense covers nearly everything else.

The thing is, these utilities are a lot more tractable than FreePort,
and maintaining security in such an environment is going to be a damned
sight more doable than maintaining it in FreePort.

The likelihood of stumbling on new, unforseen relationships among regular
unix utilities is way less than the likelihood of the same thing among
(regular unix utilities + FreePort), and is likely to have been observed and
dealt with before.

For one thing, there's the whole usenet and years of existing practice to help.
This is not the case with FreePort (if it were, the problems would've gone away
by now; somebody would know all about interfacing Pine with FreePort, for example).

>With you patient readers that have gotten this far I will share my main
          ^^^^^^^ :)
>concern:  that 'consideration' of providing general shell access is going
>to be limited to 'gee, would that be nice, or what?', and not of the
>consequences that could ensue.

Well, no.  I hope we can do better than that.
The consequences are no worse (or different) than they are from giving
users access only to FreePort, but can be better, because of better tools
and more knowledge (available) with unix/shell.

My point is, that FreePort provides no protection from any foreseeable
consequences.  At least none that I'd have any confidence in.  In fact,
I wouldn't be surprised if FreePort might turn out to be one of the things
we'd get rid of if we wanted to protect ourselves from "consequences".

Is anybody willing to get up and say that the FreePort software has protected
us from "consequences" more than can be simply attributed to the basic decency
of the majority of our users?  (sorry, just assuming that it has, won't cut it)
In other words, do we have evidence that we'd have "less" bad guys with FreePort
than we would have by granting shell access on request?

All the evidence I see indicates otherwise.

>                                Like having to charge to pay for full-time
>sysadmins, or Internet access.  Not that this would necessarily happen.
>But has anyone considered it?

We are considering it right now.  I hope we can keep doing it.

Of course, there will be "problems".  I doubt if any of them will turn out to
be insoluble.  Will they be worse than what we've seen so far?  I don't know.
When's the next earthquake?  Anwer that, and you've answered the other.

We might someday have to go to some kind of a sliding-scale structure.
I'd have no problem with that.

As far as internet connections go, I would hope that there is a net-head
out there who stays on top of that stuff...maybe a volunteer is needed to
do something like that (monitor newsgroups, etc).  Maybe that's an area for
the "volunteer coordinator" to deal with.  Maybe CPSR has some smarts in this
area.

Anybody with more experience than me, or genuine horror stories about
granting shell access, that could've been preventable by FreePort
(or its equivalent, bugs and all), feel free to speak up.

I think I've answered all of the points jj raises and hope I've anticipated
most of the objections that haven't yet been voiced.  Fortunately for you
all, I've pretty much said all I need to say on the subject.
--kurt
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From randy at scn.org  Tue Jan 13 16:42:25 1998
From: randy at scn.org (Randy Groves)
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 16:42:25 -0800
Subject: was "RE: Homelessness and the web", now shell access
In-Reply-To: <199801132315.PAA20585@grogatch.seaslug.org>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980113164225.0098f820@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com>

At 03:15 PM 1/13/98 -0800, Kurt Cockrum wrote:
>[sorry this is so long, but I'm trying to cover as many bases as I can.]
>
>jj said:
>>> [....]
>>> resend the following paragraph.  SCN should seriously consider this
>>> policy change: let everyone have shell access if they want it.  If
>>> Speakeasy can do it without it becoming a security hassle, why can't we? 
>>
>>Speakeasy also has full-time (= paid) staff.  Does this make a difference?
>


>Well, currently SCN pays one person.  Can they handle two?  

I'd sure like to find out who that person is.  Where did you get THIS
information?

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From kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org  Wed Jan 14 10:57:05 1998
From: kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org (Kurt Cockrum)
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 10:57:05 -0800
Subject: was "RE: Homelessness and the web", now shell access (oops)
Message-ID: <199801141857.KAA20983@grogatch.seaslug.org>

Earlier I said in response to jj's posting:
>Well, currently SCN pays one person.  Can they handle two?  It's conceivable,
>[...]
>On the other hand, paying somebody a subsistence wage might provide great gains.
[...]

I've been told that we aren't paying anybody now, that that is ancient
history.  So the difference between how paid sysadmins and volunteer
sysadmins perform, while of academic interest, is moot.

I don't think any of my other arguments are affected.
--kurt
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From steve at accessone.com  Wed Jan 14 22:52:21 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 22:52:21 -0800
Subject: Filtering vs First Amendment
Message-ID: <199801150653.WAA01446@accessone.com>

Thought I'd post this stuff while we're debating whether anyone
should post this stuff.  Perhaps we should set up a non-SCN list for
those of you who are interested in receiving this stuff.  Anybody 
interested?

========================

Library Case Will Launch Simple but Powerful Argument

NY Times 1/15/98


A library patron has no constitutional right to require the local
library to carry a particular book, magazine or Web page. 

That, in a nutshell, is the simple but powerful legal argument
expected to be launched in the next few weeks by the defendants in a
closely watched federal lawsuit that could further define free speech
rights in cyberspace. 

Last month, 11 individuals joined a grassroots group called
Mainstream Loudoun to file a federal lawsuit aimed at stopping a
two-month-old Internet usage policy of the public library system of
Loudoun County, Va. The library's response to the lawsuit is due by
February 2. 

Loudoun's policy, which the library says is partly designed to combat
potential "sexual harassment" of library staff, requires that all
Internet terminals in the Loudoun library system contain filtering
software designed to block hard-core and soft-core pornographic
sites. 

Under the policy, library Internet terminals are fully visible to
other library patrons and library staff. Children are not allowed to
use the filtered Internet terminals without parental permission. 

Also, if a patron is caught viewing an inappropriate Web site that
somehow escaped the filter, he is asked to stop by the library staff.
If the patron refuses, he is asked to leave. If he refuses to leave,
he is subject to criminal trespassing charges. 

In legal papers filed in the Federal District Court for the Eastern
District of Virginia in Alexandria, opponents say that the library
policy is government activity that infringes the First Amendment
rights of library patrons, because it results in the removal from the
library of a substantial amount of speech that is not obscene or
otherwise constitutionally objectionable. The lawsuit also claims
that the location of terminals in the middle of the library floor may
result in chilling a patron's intention to view sensitive materials. 

Kenneth C. Bass 3d, a lawyer hired by Loudoun County to defend the
case, said in an interview last week that the claim asserted against
the Loudoun library system is "the first of its kind . . . a claim
unknown to constitutional litigators." 

He added later: "I think there is no prior litigation in the history
of the United States where someone has sought in the guise of the
First Amendment publicly funded access to private peep shows, which
is what the complaint seeks." 

Bass, 53, a partner at Venable, Baetjer, Howard & Civiletti, a law
firm with offices in Washington, D.C., that has handled some
high-profile Internet litigation, said that he supported the Supreme
Court's landmark decision last year in Reno v. ACLU, in which the
court struck down certain provisions of the Communications Decency
Act that sought to ban the dissemination of indecent material on the
Internet. 

"But," he said, "that is very different from asserting, as the
plaintiffs have done in this case, that a patron has a constitutional
right to compel a library to acquire anything the patron wants to
read. That is an unprecedented claim. . . . It is also an argument
that no one would have made before the development of Web
technology." 

According to Bass, there is at least one Supreme Court case that
favors Loudoun's position in the library filtering war. 

In Board of Education v. Pico, a 1982 case, the Board of Education of
Island Trees Union Free School District in Long Island ordered that
certain books, which the board characterized as "anti-American,
anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy," be removed from
high school and junior high school libraries. 

Writing for a plurality, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. said that
local school boards may not "remove" books from library shelves
simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books. But
the court added that its ruling affected only a librarian's
discretion to take books off shelves, not a library's wide latitude
in deciding which books to acquire. 

"Brennan's opinion stands for the proposition that the First
Amendment does not regulate a library's acquisition policy," Bass
said. "And this is an acquisition case. The library policy and
software are aimed at preventing the acquisition of material that is
reasonably vulgar or obscene. . . . Pico is good authority for the
proposition that what Loudoun has done is perfectly appropriate." 

Bass said he plans to make a motion to dismiss the case in the next
few weeks based on the argument that the plaintiff's have failed to
state a valid First Amendment claim. He added that he intends to make
technical arguments challenging the standing of certain plaintiffs to
sue, claiming immunity for certain individual defendants, and pointing
out factual errors in the complaint. 

Responding to the potential defense arguments, Robert Corn-Revere, a
lawyer for the library patrons, said that library's filtering policy
was a form of content removal, not acquisition, thus pulling the Pico
case on the side of the plaintiffs. 

"This goes far beyond any kind of acquisition policy and in fact is a
censorship policy," he said, adding that the filtering software
employed by the library, a product called X-STOP, doesn't acquire
anything, "it simply excludes." 

Corn-Revere characterized the library's use of filtering software as
analogous to "subscribing to a magazine and after the fact razoring
out articles you think are offensive." 

In any event, the lawsuit is not just about using software to exclude
condemned speech. "Their entire Internet policy is designed to limit
what people in the library read on the Internet," said Corn-Revere, a
partner at Hogan & Hartson, a Washington, D.C., law firm, referring
to the library system's policy of having librarians look over the
shoulders of people sitting at the filtered Internet terminals. 

In other developments in the Loudoun case, the American Civil
Liberties Union has expressed concern about how the Loudoun policy
could limit the rights of a different group of citizens -- Internet
content publishers. The group is currently examining whether to
intervene in the lawsuit on behalf of such contenet providers. A
decision is "imminent," a spokesman said. 

Also, the Loudoun case has already launched the political career of
at least one defendant. Richard Black, a Loudoun library trustee and
author of the Internet policy, announced on January 5 that he is
running for a vacant seat in Virginia's House of Delegates. If
elected, he would support a statewide library filtering policy, he
said in an interview last week. 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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From carlp at cpsr.org  Thu Jan 15 19:57:27 1998
From: carlp at cpsr.org (Carl B. Page)
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 19:57:27 -0800
Subject: CPSR/Seattle special event - Jan. 21st
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19980115195727.030aa100@mail.accessone.com>

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From steve at accessone.com  Sat Jan 17 17:37:24 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 1998 17:37:24 -0800
Subject: Echo - something to consider?
Message-ID: <199801180138.RAA21660@accessone.com>

This info is from the Echo site (www.echonyc.com) - "the virtual
salon of New York City."  Perhaps something along these lines might
be a useful model for some branch of SCNA?  (with or without the 
fees...)

===========================

Echo is unlike anything you'll find on the Internet. 

Founded six years ago in the heart of the West Village, Echo was the
first virtual community to take hold in New York City. Before there
was a World Wide Web, Echo was home to a small but vibrant collective
of people who shared common passions for reading, writing and
conversation. 

Today, Echo is a thriving electronic salon of over 3,000 members,
where people come together to share ideas and experiences. Post a
message and speak to dozens of friends and strangers, or just lurk
and listen. Echo is home to a wildly diverse crowd of New Yorkers,
who meet face-to-face at several events every month of the year. The
Echo community goes beyond the screen. 

Echo - lauded by the New York Times as "a cultural icon of the online
community" - is where journalists, writers, and actors mix easily
with teachers, lawyers, priests, and students. It's where raging
arguments over political and literary issues meld with intense
psychological discussions.

"Echo is a mixture of the corner bar, the debating society, and the
hottest club in town," says Echo Communications Group president Stacy
Horn, who founded Echo six years ago. 

"We've attracted writers from the country's top newspapers and
magazines, big-name and unsigned musicians, well-known new media
artists, the curious and the disenfranchised. It's really as big and
diverse as New York itself," Horn says. 

Echo is composed of over sixty conferences, such as Culture, Angst,
Music, and the House of Thought. Within each conference, dozens of
ongoing conversations are moderated by a host who welcomes newcomers
into the mix, sees that conversations flow, and keeps squabbles in
check. Echoids log in to talk about movies, Jacques Derrrida, old
cartoons, the Ramones, the East Village, Prague. Conversations are
articulate and free-wheeling. 

Over 40% of the 3,500 people on Echo are women - significantly more
than on other online systems. Activity on Echo is brisk, with
hundreds and hundreds of new responses posted each day. Reasonable
rates allow users to support a habit that can easily occupy an hour
or more each day, and a staff of seven maintains the system and
answers questions online and over the phone. For users eager to
explore cyberspace, Echo offers full Internet access at a discounted
rate to members of the conferencing system.

Once people have bared their souls online, they want more-they want
to meet face to face.Twice a month, Echoids meet at the Cafe Bar in
SoHo for drinks and conversation. They play weekly softball games in
Central Park. Or they frequent shows by their favorite all Echo band.
The connection reaches beyond the keyboard. 

"I'm not a purist," says Horn. "For me, the online connection isn't
complete until you meet someone offline. People who have
conversations online and have met face to face have a certain warmth
to them, a tolerance. People go even further in terms of intimacy." 

Horn holds a master's degree in telecommunications from New York
University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she now
teaches a course on virtual culture. 

For the larger new media community in New York City, Echo produces a
bimonthly discussion series called Virtual Culture, where leaders in
new media have recently debated topics such as the Internet
censorship question and the future of film and television in
cyberspace. And a monthly reading series called Read Only, where
writers on Echo read from their recently published work, regularly
draws capacity crowds in Manhattan's East Village. 

Echo has also participated in two experiments with interactive
television. One, sponsored by USA Networks' Sci-Fi Channel, ran live
online commentary during episodes of the cult classic The Prisoner.
And NYU's acclaimed Interactive Telecommunications Program produces a
weekly interactive program called Yorb, using Echo as its online
component. 

Electronic communities are proof that computers are no longer
synonymous with anti-social behavior. Once, a user sat in seclusion
with his computer-it was just him and the screen, alone Now we know
our modems can take us places where there are other people, where we
can swap stories ask for advice, connect. The machines that we once
thought would alienate us are helping to reacquaint us with each
other. Virtual communities take us beyond the World Wide Web, beyond
the latest "killer app," to a world where people furiously type in
their fears, their frustrations, their life stories and dreams.
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From anitra at speakeasy.org  Sat Jan 17 14:52:31 1998
From: anitra at speakeasy.org (Anitra Again)
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 1998 14:52:31 -0800 (PST)
Subject: FWD: Problems with SCN mail
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980117145038.24954A-100000@eve.speakeasy.org>

I received this through a couple of relays:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 1998 14:25:01 -0800 (PST)
From: William Affleck-Asch <feminist at eskimo.com>
To: PNWNOW-GEN <pnwnow-gen at eskimo.com>, PNWNOW-LEG <pnwnow-leg at eskimo.com>
Subject: ADMIN: For some reason, scn.org is too far for emails now
Resent-Date: Sat, 17 Jan 1998 14:25:11 -0800
Resent-From: pnwnow-leg at eskimo.com


Hi all,

If you know someone on the Seattle Community Network who can't get email,
it's becuase they're more than 17 hops via the Net from BOTH AT&T Worldnet
(e.g. feminist at worldnet.att.net ) and Eskimo North (e.g.
feminist at eskimo.com ).

Which means many people can't email Seattle NOW at now at scn.org.
To test if you can, click on this link 
<a href="mailto:now at scn.org?subject=ARE-YOU-THERE-NOW">HERE</a>
and see if you get back an email saying they can't talk to SCN.

Why would this happen?  Basically, somehow the Seattle Community Network
must have been moved further off the backbone of the Net.  If anyone has a
contact number for SCN, could they pass this on to them or to
postmaster at scn.org perhaps?

Thanks!

William Affleck-Asch  |  The above is my personal opinion only and does not
Seattle               |  necessarily reflect the opinions of any of the
feminist at eskimo.com   |  many organizations I belong to or represent. :-)
Webitor for Washington State NOW
List Admin for PNWNOW-GEN and PNWNOW-LEG
[end forward]

Anyone here who can check into this?

______
Anitra


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From help at scn.org  Sun Jan 18 18:15:01 1998
From: help at scn.org (SCN help)
Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 18:15:01 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Thanks! (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980118181338.26362D-100000@scn>



 From the SCN Help Desk

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 15:57:36 -0800 (PST)
From: SCN User <jazzbo at scn.org>
To: help at scn.org
Subject: Thanks!

To All The Dedicated Volunteers At SCN:

You don't know me, and I don't know you, but we're all bumping around in 
cyber-space.

Sounds like SCN has been having a few problems of late. As an SCN user 
who is low-income and of low technology-understanding, I just want to 
take a moment to say "THANK YOU" to all of you who make email available 
to the likes of me.  I live in an isolated situation, and email has 
opened up new levels of communication to me that I never dreamed 
possible. I realize that it is the efforts of folks like you (who keep 
the systems running) that make it possible for me to experience the 
convience of cyber-communication. 
Thank you.

Please feel free to forward this from the "help" desk to all SCN 
volunteers who make the network happen. I appreciate your efforts through 
all the glitches and weirdness. Keep the faith. You are doing more good 
in more ways than you can probably ever fully know...

So-THANKS, SCN "Computer nerds!" 
(I use the term fondly.)
You are doing a GREAT job. I certainly don't mind being "offline" now and 
again as you brainy-types navigate the intricate manueuvers required to 
keep the ball rolling.

Thank you all. 
Now give yourselves a good pat on the back 
and pour another cup of coffee.

Gratefully,
jazzbo at scn.org

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From spban at eskimo.com  Mon Jan 19 08:18:46 1998
From: spban at eskimo.com (Stefani Banerian)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 08:18:46 -0800
Subject: Echo - something to consider?
Message-ID: <1.5.4.16.19980119161846.242fa27c@mail.eskimo.com>

At 05:37 PM 1/17/1998 -0800, you wrote:
>This info is from the Echo site (www.echonyc.com) - "the virtual
>salon of New York City."  Perhaps something along these lines might
>be a useful model for some branch of SCNA?  (with or without the 
>fees...)
>
>===========================
>
>Echo is unlike anything you'll find on the Internet. 

(untrue)   www.utne.com  also has online conferences. but that is quibbling...

After having seen and participated in one of these conference web sites, it
would seem feasible for us to try it.  Again with the caveat that there are
also other "projects" that need to be done.

And it would need to be text-browser capable, unlike the www.utne.com site,
which is virtually useless without graphics.

the following paragraphs were retained, because i think they provide what
SCN *ought* to be doing.

such conferences can be "moderated" in the sense that the moderator can
control who has access to the conference.  

>Echo is composed of over sixty conferences, such as Culture, Angst,
>Music, and the House of Thought. Within each conference, dozens of
>ongoing conversations are moderated by a host who welcomes newcomers
>into the mix, sees that conversations flow, and keeps squabbles in
>check. Echoids log in to talk about movies, Jacques Derrrida, old
>cartoons, the Ramones, the East Village, Prague. Conversations are
>articulate and free-wheeling. 
>
>Over 40% of the 3,500 people on Echo are women - significantly more
>than on other online systems. Activity on Echo is brisk, with
>hundreds and hundreds of new responses posted each day. Reasonable
>rates allow users to support a habit that can easily occupy an hour
>or more each day, and a staff of seven maintains the system and
>answers questions online and over the phone. For users eager to
>explore cyberspace, Echo offers full Internet access at a discounted
>rate to members of the conferencing system.
>
>Echo has also participated in two experiments with interactive
>television. One, sponsored by USA Networks' Sci-Fi Channel, ran live
>online commentary during episodes of the cult classic The Prisoner.
>And NYU's acclaimed Interactive Telecommunications Program produces a
>weekly interactive program called Yorb, using Echo as its online
>component. 
--
Stefani Banerian	This space available for your advertisement.
banerian at scn.org	Free!  No warranty. No satisfaction guaranteed.

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From douglas  Mon Jan 19 08:34:46 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 08:34:46 -0800 (PST)
Subject: FYI (input to state library plan)
Message-ID: <199801191634.IAA21015@scn.org>


Here is a note from Bruce McComb.  I assume that he would like
to see input from SCN people.

-- Doug

> From: bmccomb at mail.tcfn.org
> Date: Sat, 17 Jan 1998 12:50:14 +0500 
> Subject: Input to State Library Plan
> To: comnets at u.washington.edu
> 
> The RECA Foundation is the Washington State Representative for 
> Community Networks on the Statewide Plan for Washington Libraries.
> 
> Our input from the last planning meeting can be reviewed on our web
> site at:
> 
>                   http://www.tcfn.org/recafnd/1stqtr98/1stqtr98.html
> 
> The letter provides a good review of our plans for a Regional
> Dissabilites 
> Resource Center as well as the integration of Computer Technology 
> Centers into the library system.
> 
>  Bruce McComb, Executive Director
>                                 RECA FOUNDATION
>                    605 South Olympia #74  Kennewick, Wa 99336
>                 Phone:  (509) 543-2910  e-mail:  sysop at tcfn.org
>                                         
>                                          PROGRAMS
> * TCFN     The Columbia Free-Net, Modem: (509) 543-2900,
> telnet://tcfn.org,                 http://www.tcfn.org
> 
> * CBPIN    Columbia Basin Public Information Network
>                    http://www.tcfn.org/cbpin.htm
> Founding members:  Arts Council of the Mid-Columbia Region, BOSS
> Internet Group, Educational Service District 123, Franklin County,
> Mid-Columbia Library, NW Public Television, Washington State University
> Cooperative Extension, and Tri-Cities Free-Net (TCFN)
> 
> "The old America strove to assimilate difference, The new America will 
> find strength in valuing diversity."
> 
> 
> 
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From steve at accessone.com  Mon Jan 19 08:56:15 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 08:56:15 -0800
Subject: Filtering rules
Message-ID: <199801191657.IAA01540@accessone.com>

Rules for Filtering Web Content Cause Dispute

NY Times 1/19/98


In a private vote by e-mail a few days before Christmas, a group of
about 200 computer scientists and engineers endorsed a set of rules
that could govern some of the most fundamental ways people around the
globe will get electronic information -- and will be prevented from
getting it -- in years to come. 

Members of the group, the World Wide Web Consortium based at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say they were simply agreeing
on a technical standard to allow much-needed filtering of the Web's
vast store of information. 

They were building a tool, they say, not passing a law. And in that
spirit, little notice was taken of their action, which revolved
around the arcane technical specifications and lines of computer code
that define the Platform for Internet Content Selection or, in the
trade, PICS. 

But a growing number of civil libertarians argue that these
technologists are in some ways acting as an unelected world
government, wielding power that will shape social relations and
political rights for years to come. In cyberspace, these critics
assert, computer code has the force of law. 

The filtering system, a technology for defining what parts of the Web
will be accessible from a particular computer or group of computers,
was originally conceived as a way to head off government regulation
of speech in cyberspace. 

After the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act
last June, declaring it an unconstitutional restraint of free speech,
such technology was widely seen as the best alternative, because it
would enable parents to shield children, with a few clicks of a
computer mouse, from information deemed harmful. 

But in an increasingly vigorous debate, civil-liberties groups are
condemning the PICS technology as a mechanism for censorship, while
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the
consortium that approved the standard, is defending it as a force for
social good. 

Critics argue that repressive governments can use the filtering
technology as a tool to screen political speech and that in the
United States the most likely application will effectively block much
of the constitutionally protected expression that has made the Web a
particularly democratic communications medium. 

"This is a technique that is designed to enable one party to control
what another can access," said David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center. "The most palatable formulation of that is
parent-child, but the fact is it also allows a government or an
Internet service provider to take on that parental role and decide
what anyone downstream is going to be able to see -- and no steps
have been taken to prevent that." 

Microsoft Corp. has already incorporated an early version of the
content-selection technology into its Internet Explorer Web browser.
But free-speech advocates fear that the rules endorsed last month will
speed up the technology's adoption by making it far easier to use. 

Which is exactly the point, the defenders of the filter standard say.
At a recent meeting of Clinton administration officials and Internet
industry representatives in Washington, Vice President Al Gore
stressed a need for the information industry to provide parents with
easy technological fixes. 

Berners-Lee, who invented the Web at the CERN laboratory in Geneva as
a seamless world of information accessible from any kind of computer,
insists that the benefits of the "PICSRules," as the recent addition
to the standard is known, outweigh its drawbacks. 

"I appreciate your concerns," he wrote in response to a statement
from a civil-liberties coalition, the Global Internet Liberty
Campaign. "Whilst I tend personally to share them at the level of
principle, I do not believe that the PICSRules technology presents,
on balance, a danger rather than a boon to society. I can also affirm
that the intent of the initiative is certainly not as a tool for
government control, but as a tool for user control, which will indeed
reduce the pressure for government action." 

Whatever the merits of the opposing claims, the controversy
underscores the exceptional influence that technologists wield in
formulating the rules that govern cyberspace. It also presages
increasing tension between the architects of the Internet and the
people who use it, as profound policy implications of technical
decisions also loom for privacy and intellectual property. 

Traditionally, the technical rules that allow computers to perform
tasks like sending and receiving electronic mail or documents were
developed by organizations that represented the institutions,
companies and individuals that most used the medium. 

But at a time when the global computer network is no longer the
private preserve of scientists and academics, the procedures of
groups like the one headed by Berners-Lee -- the World Wide Web
Consortium, known as W3C -- are being called into question. 

Indeed, many of the civil libertarians who oppose the filter
technology initially touted it as an alternative to government
interference. More recently, they have concluded that
speech-regulation features woven into the Internet may be as
threatening to free expression as legislation. 

"The W3C is taking on a quasi-governmental role, and to the extent
that the standards it adopts become the basic standards of the
Internet, it will have more influence than most national governments
will have," said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American
Civil Liberties Union. "These are not mere technical standards that
engineers should be establishing. This platform raises fundamental
questions about free speech, and that debate should occur in public." 

In a recent interview, Berners-Lee portrayed members of the group as
social activists conscious of their legislation like power and
struggling to exercise it responsibly. 

"Most of the people who are working on the Web are not doing it
because they have a frantic urge to program," Berners-Lee said.
"They're doing it because they have a vision of how society should be
improved. The difference is, now people can make social things
possible by creating technology, whereas before, to make social
things possible, really all you could do was make laws." 

Ultimately, how effective such standards are will depend on whether
the major Internet browser companies apply them. Thomas Reardon,
Microsoft's program manager for Internet architecture, and a member
of the World Wide Web Consortium's advisory council, said the company
was continuing to evaluate whether to include the technology in future
versions of its browser. 

"We're certainly looking at which users get the most from it, and
we're also aware of the downsides of government abuse, especially in
foreign situations," Reardon said. "The company is going through a
process of trying to look at it more formally." 

The World Wide Web Consortium's 231 members include most computing
and telecommunications companies that have significant stakes in the
Internet, some government agencies and several nonprofit groups.
Membership fees are on a sliding scale, from $5,000 to $50,000. The
group's stated goal is "to realize the full potential of the Web." 

The challenge in keeping the group apolitical, Berners-Lee said, is
to create ways of achieving social goals that are "policy
independent." 

The platform selection technology, for example, is not itself a
rating system but a labeling system that enables Web publishers to
rate themselves or to be rated by third parties. 

Labels are essential to the growth of the Web, proponents of the
filter standard argue, because while browser software cannot now look
at the millions of sites on the Web and determine which contain
violence or nudity, it can sort by looking at labels that describe
the site's content. 

Under the model endorsed last month, anyone or any group -- from Good
Housekeeping magazine to the government of Singapore to the Christian
Coalition -- could create a ratings system, and parents could select
the one that best represented their values. Aside from any benefits to
children, widespread adoption of labeling would allow sorting by
quality of information according to particular sources or other
criteria. 

A problem is that the Web is vast and rating is labor-intensive.
Civil libertarians say that the most likely outcome in the United
States will be dominance by a few ratings systems that will probably
exclude much of the material on the Web. Nor, they point out, would
there be anything to prevent Congress from passing a law requiring the
use of such systems. 

More frightening, the critics say, the new version of the filter
specifications allows third parties to block all material originating
from a particular Internet address like a political organization, a
country or a group of nations. 

The European Commission has expressed interest in using the filters
to enforce a policy to block illegal content. China, which recently
announced new Internet censorship rules, and Singapore are widely
cited as likely to use the filtering technology to impose censorship.

Paul Resnick, one of the inventors of the content selection system,
has created a sort of incubator at the University of Michigan, where
he is an associate professor in the School of Information, to
encourage the development of multiple ratings systems. 

"In the information age, issues of how information flows are going to
have a huge impact on commerce, society and politics," Resnick said.
"That's why this debate is happening. I think we as technologists
have a special responsibility to educate policy-makers, to educate
the public about what's possible. I think we also have a
responsibility to invent new technologies that meet public goals with
the fewest negative side effects. 

"But," he added, "if I go over a certain boundary and say what the
public's goal ought to be, then I think I'm overstepping my bounds
and abusing my power." 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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From kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org  Mon Jan 19 12:14:26 1998
From: kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org (Kurt Cockrum)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 12:14:26 -0800
Subject: Echo - something to consider? (look under the hood first)
Message-ID: <199801192014.MAA14894@grogatch.seaslug.org>

Reference: <199801180138.RAA21660 at accessone.com>

Thanks, Steve, for giving me something to chaw on this morning...made
my day! :) :)

>From Steve's forwarding:
>Echo is unlike anything you'll find on the Internet. 
>[...]

Danger Will Robinson!

>[...]
>Echo - lauded by the New York Times as "a cultural icon of the online
        ^^^^^^        ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^
>community" - is where journalists, writers, and actors mix easily
                       ^^^^^^^^^^^
>with teachers, lawyers, priests, and students.

Not to mention celebrities...
"TODAY in Salon #14, all the way from exotic Lake Tahoe, Cher Bono
reminisces ON-LINE about Sonny and the ongoing tragedy of unregulated
trees...hit `Go Cher' to join!!!" [ Thanks, Geov Parrish for the tree
bit! ]

>                                               It's where raging
>arguments over political and literary issues meld with intense
>psychological discussions.

yeah, yeah, yeah...I wonder if there are any "raging arguments" about
the detrimental effect that the self-reflexive activity of journalists
and media have on the rest of society...

>"Echo is a mixture of the corner bar, the debating society, and the
>hottest club in town," says Echo Communications Group president Stacy
                             ^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^
>Horn, who founded Echo six years ago. 

>"We've attracted writers from the country's top newspapers and
                                             ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^
>magazines, big-name and unsigned musicians, well-known new media
 ^^^^^^^^^  ^^^^^^^^                         ^^^^^^^^^^
>artists, the curious and the disenfranchised. It's really as big and
>diverse as New York itself," Horn says. 
>[...]

Oh, gimme a break...
Thank goodness SCN doesn't have any celebrities aboard!
(if there are, they are mercifully keeping their mouths shut;
kudos to them if this is true.  But, celebs, don't blow your
cover by privately e-mailing *me* about it; like you, I don't
want to be bugged, nor do I wish to burdened with secrets... :)

>Echo is composed of over sixty conferences, such as Culture, Angst,
>Music, and the House of Thought. [...]
>[...]                                            Conversations are
>articulate and free-wheeling. 

bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

>Over 40% of the 3,500 people on Echo are women - significantly more
>than on other online systems. Activity on Echo is brisk, with
>hundreds and hundreds of new responses posted each day. Reasonable
>rates allow users to support a habit that can easily occupy an hour
>or more each day,

unlike drugs, which are not only expensive and illegal, but take more
time trying to get...and in this hard-pressed society, time is something
in short supply...so what do smart shoppers do?? :) :)  hee, hee

>                  and a staff of seven maintains the system and
>answers questions online and over the phone. For users eager to
>explore cyberspace, Echo offers full Internet access at a discounted
>rate to members of the conferencing system.
>[...]

In other words, a perfectly ordinary, vanilla ISP...

>Horn holds a master's degree in telecommunications from New York
                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she now
>teaches a course on virtual culture. 

where she teaches her students how to design virtual clothing for
the Emperor, how to conceal brutal realities in a virtual cloak of
well-spun words, and other journalistic tricks...

>[...]
>Electronic communities are proof that computers are no longer
>synonymous with anti-social behavior.

Whenever I see a phrase like that, I'm reminded that journalists
in general are as clueless and/or cynical as ever. The perception that
computers are "synonymous with anti-social behavior" was media-generated,
and nobody but a journalist would be dumb enough to believe that in the
first place.  For a trade that seems to spend about 75% of their time
talking about themselves and the ripple-type effects of their societal
presence, this is an astonishing lack of self-awareness.
How can a collectivity be so self-servingly ingenous?  For me, this is
a continuing source of amazement.

>                                      Once, a user sat in seclusion
>with his computer-it was just him and the screen, alone

...in blessed solitude, getting some work done...
and then came along another guy with a clipboard, and, poof, that all
magically went away... and now there are zillions of clueless journalists
online, of all sexes and genders, that can breathlessly reinterpret
everything they see to fit their {mis,pre}conceptions, and as a side-effect,
help to maintain the old stereotypes as key parts of the journalistic
toolbox...the only one missing is "clueless journalist" itself.

>                                                        Now we know
>our modems can take us places where there are other people, where we
>can swap stories ask for advice, connect. The machines that we once
>thought would alienate us are helping to reacquaint us with each
>other.

duh *slap-on-the-forehead* hey, I never thought of that!  wow!

Why blame the poor innocent *machines*??  Journalists *using*
machines do it to perfection, just as they did back when everything
was done by hand!  In a literal sense, Stacy Horn, being a journalist
herself, part of the trade that continually *re-invents* the notion of
computer-mediated alienation, now touts her operation as the means of
"reacquainting us with each other", totally ignoring the existence of
hundreds of positively ancient on-line communities that have silently
(at least as best they could, given that journalists exist in the first
place) done all that years ago.

...and now she comes along, in a puff-piece she might have written
herself (a real hands-on gal), as a shameless self-promotional effort
(can you say, "unpaid advertisement"?), and reinvents the entire notion
of "virtual salon"!  The utter gall!  And she gets paid for teaching
this to her students!

Now, in all seriousness, ignoring for the moment, all my rock-throwing,
go back and re-read that PR puff-piece *critically*, and ask youself,
what does Echo do that isn't *already* *being* done by us and hundreds
of other on-line communities all over the country, and reflect on the
seductive power of words to blind us to already-existing realities,
and incidentally casting them in a poor light by design.

Just when you thought you had finished washing yourself, so to speak,
getting yourself all spiffy-clean, somebody comes along and tells you that
despite your best efforts, that your armpits or crotch *still* stink,
and by implication, you are a subhuman antisocial wretch unless you
buy into this "new" solution.  Where have we seen this pattern before??

What is really new in the story about Echo??
If I were a professor lecturing about the evils of uncritical
journalism-gone-bad, I'd clip this one for my case-book.

SCN workers, *don't* buy into this crap!!  You are doing way better
than Horn is telling you.

>       Virtual communities take us beyond the World Wide Web, beyond
>the latest "killer app," to a world where people furiously type in
                                                  ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^
>their fears, their frustrations, their life stories and dreams.
       ^^^^^        ^^^^^^^^^^^^

uhhh...like me??

Don't get me going about the "killer app" I'd like to see...
I might get in *real* trouble... :) :)
...especially if a journalist who doesn't know what smileys mean
stumbles across this screed... :( :(

...and just in case a journalist is reading this in their uncritical
fashion, I offer this CLUE: this is *not* an attack on Steve Hoffman :) ...
--kurt
 Do I hate journalists? do bears violate the CDA in the woods?
 Actually I don't hate them, I just dislike them intensely, and have
 practically no respect for them, because they are the catalysts
 that cause things to nightmarishly self-mutate into their opposites...
 and H. L. Mencken, spinning at about 10000 RPM, would doubtless agree :)
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From kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org  Mon Jan 19 13:09:15 1998
From: kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org (Kurt Cockrum)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 13:09:15 -0800
Subject: fwd from slug-list@seaslug.org: [gcrick@main.org: Washington State ISP legislation]
Message-ID: <199801192109.NAA16313@grogatch.seaslug.org>

Apologies if you see this more than once...
FYI:
 Message-ID: <19980119091017.48239 at celestial.com>
 Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 09:10:17 -0800
 From: Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com>
 To: slug-list at seaslug.org
 Subject: [gcrick at main.org: Washington State ISP legislation]
 Reply-To: bill at celestial.com
 Mime-Version: 1.0
 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=hlLboLdkugWU4S2B
 X-Mailer: Mutt 0.88
 Sender: owner-slug-list at celestial.com
 Precedence: bulk


 --hlLboLdkugWU4S2B
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

 Interesting things happening in Olympia!  Ray and I are scheduled to
 participate in the hearings on Unsolicted e-mail.

 Bill
 --
 INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Systems, Inc.
 UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 2835 82nd Avenue S.E. S-100
 FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
 URL: http://www.celestial.com/

 Bagdikian's Observation:
 	Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American
 	newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion"
 	on a ukelele.

 --hlLboLdkugWU4S2B
 Content-Type: message/rfc822
 Content-Description: Forwarded message from Gene Crick <gcrick at main.org>

 [...junk deleted --kurt...]
 Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 23:24:15 -0600 (CST)
 Message-Id: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980118231518.8713A-100000 at main1.main.org>
 [...junk deleted --kurt...]
 From: Gene Crick <gcrick at main.org>
 To: Multiple recipients of list <tispa at swri.edu>
 Subject: Washington State ISP legislation
 X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
 Content-Type: text/plain
 Content-Disposition: attachment


 re:  ISP Legislative initiatives in other states.

 FYI - This from a colleague in Washington State. 

 gene



 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
 Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 19:25:37 -0800
 From: Gary Gardner--Executive Director <exec-director at waisp.org>
 Subject: WAISP Legislative Update 1/18/98

 Our legislative session just started... thought you might be
 interested in this.
[...and nobody's life, liberty or property are safe :) --kurt]

 Gary Gardner
 Executive Director
 Washington Association of Internet Service Providers
 Legislative Report
 Sunday January 18, 1998


 The first week of the 1998 session of the Washington Legislature was as
 face-paced as anyone can remember.  It is a short session -- 60 days which
 doubles the pace for everyone.  For the ISP industry there are several
 developments that will have an impact on the Internet and related
 telecommunications issues.

 Note, you can find copies of all bills and amendments mentioned in this
 report at the Washington Legislature's Web Page --
 http://www.leginfo.leg.wa.gov

 There are only two bills that were introduced and available for on-line
 review at this time.  The first is HB 2553 which extends the ban on the
 WUTC accepting a filing for a mandatory measured telephone service tariff.
 That ban was set to expire June 1 of this year, and in this legislation the
 ban is extended to June 1, 2001.  If the bill passes, the WUTC cannot even
 think about accepting a request for mandatory measured service until 2001.
 The WAISP supported this bill last year (it did not make it through the
 session), and will support the bill again this year.

 The second bill is HB 2425, which is the energy and telecommunications tax
 restructuring bill we have been working on all summer.  The bill DOES NOT
 include ISPs as telecommunications providers and thus spares us from having
 to tax our users as telephone companies tax their users -- for the time
 being.  We will watch this closely to keep ISPs from being included.

 Both of these bills are scheduled for hearings this week.

 As we mentioned last week the Washington Attorney General's office
 approached WAISP a few weeks ago about possible anti SPAM or Unsolicited
 Commercial E-Mail legislation. We worked closely with their office to draft
 a bill that seems to have grown legs and is now gaining a lot of popularity
 among legislators.  The bill has the formal support of the Attorney
 General's Office which carries a big stick at the legislature.  The bill
 was introduced on Friday but has not yet been assigned a number and is not
 available on line for review.  We will send out an e-mail as soon as it is
 up on the legislative web page.  Key points in the bill are:

 *	Sending unsolicited commercial e-mail is a violation of the state's
 consumer protection laws.

 *	ISPs can recover $1000 in or actual damages if greater in the event
 a system is harmed by sending UCE.  Individuals can recover $500 or actual
 damages.

 *	ISPs can stop UCE or "apparent" UCE without liability.

 *	ISPs and commercial entities can send unsolicited commercial e-mail
 if the recipient has a prior business relationship with the sender.  The
 sender can request that such messages not be sent.

 There will most likely be a hearing on the bill in the House on 1/28 and
 the Senate on 1/29.  We will send you out a "checklist" of things you can
 do to help pass this bill, such as posting a notice on your web page and
 who your customers can contact to support the bill, early next week.  This
 bill will be a high priority of the WAISP.

 The WUTC made a presentation to the legislature on the "Universal Service
 Fund".  This fund is set up to provide for subsidized telecom service for
 low-income and rural residents, and to facilitate building of expensive
 infrastructure in rural areas.  There has been debate about whether or not
 ISPs should be included in the fund, and if ISPs should be able to draw
 from the fund to build infrastructure.  The WUTC has concluded that they
 will follow the FCC's guidelines and that ISPs are not to be included in
 the fund.  Legislation to implement this decision should follow shortly.

 There are a lot of ideas floating about concerning telecommunications
 regulation, particularly deregulating high-end services such as DSL.  We
 have been involved in discussions with USWest on these proposals -- and our
 concern remains that if such a service is "unregulated" than ISPs could be
 frozen out of the marketplace by single providers such as USW.  They have
 countered that if DSL is unregulated than not only with USW be offering it
 but the CLECs will also and that ISPs will not be frozen out of the market.


 The WUTC is looking at legislation to streamline their regulatory process,
 and other telecom providers are looking at ways to force USWest to open up
 the network to increased competition -- we will keep you up to date as
 events develop.

 Finally, for those ISPs who have thought about becoming CLECs, there will
 be an informal workshop in Olympia this week on that topic.  WUTC and other
 CLECs will be discussing regulations and ways to open up the competitive
 loop.  If you are interested, it will be at 3pm on Wednesday 1/21 in Senate
 Hearing Room B.  If you would like additional information please drop an
 e-mail back.


 FYI, did you know you can "listen in" on the legislature?  TVW, the
 Washington State equivalent of C-SPAN has the audio and video portion of
 all legislative hearings, live or archived at their web site --
 http://www.tvw.org




 --hlLboLdkugWU4S2B--
--kurt
 I've always thought rock-and-roll made sex and drugs a whole lot less
 fun than they could've been.  Or maybe it's that sex and drugs made rock
 and roll tolerable...
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From rclark at pop.aa.net  Mon Jan 19 05:27:35 1998
From: rclark at pop.aa.net (Rod Clark)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 13:27:35 +0000
Subject: Echo - something to consider? (look under the hood first)
Message-ID: <199801192127.NAA20139@slave2.aa.net>

> >Echo is unlike anything you'll find on the Internet. 

   Does anyone know how the Drizzle discussion groups are coming 
along, at drizzle.com? They've apparently been trying to foster 
local discussion groups for a couple of years now, away from 
Usenet.

Rod
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From steve at accessone.com  Mon Jan 19 15:58:30 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 15:58:30 -0800
Subject: Echo - something to consider? (look under the hood first)
In-Reply-To: <199801192014.MAA14894@grogatch.seaslug.org>
Message-ID: <199801192359.PAA12033@accessone.com>

Kurt wrote -
> Thanks, Steve, for giving me something to chaw on this
> morning...made my day! :) :)

Well, uhhh, gee, never mind!  Actually, I've been hiding here behind
the desk since I re-read this post - been sending out for sandwiches
while checking with friends to see if Kurt had nailed this one yet. 
:)  But there may be something useful here somewhere - as in the
notion of providing some sort of get-togethers for members/users,
outside of the committee structure.  Or maybe not.... 
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From bb615 at scn.org  Mon Jan 19 08:11:37 1998
From: bb615 at scn.org (Rod Clark)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 16:11:37 +0000
Subject: SCN in Spanish
Message-ID: <199801200012.QAA21209@scn4.scn.org>

   SCN's pages are readable in Spanish, along with other English 
language pages on the Web, with Alta Vista's language 
translation service. The results are mixed, but are usually 
usable enough that people can figure out what the pages say.

   Could someone who knows Spanish well have a look at the blurb 
about this on the SCN home page, and make sure it all makes 
sense? It should be comprehensible, but after unbending the more 
obvious snafus in Alta Vista's translation, there may still be 
some errors, and I'm not particularly fluent in Spanish. 

Rod
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From jmabel at saltmine.com  Mon Jan 19 17:03:38 1998
From: jmabel at saltmine.com (Joe Mabel)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 17:03:38 -0800
Subject: SCN in Spanish
Message-ID: <01BD24FC.30769C00@stockade.saltmine.com>

As it stands:

"El servicio de traducción de AltaVista le deja leer cualquier Web page inglés en español. En la forma de la traducción, usted debe presionar el botón marcado "Translate." Si usted ve símbolos inusuales en vez de caracteres españoles, controle las configuraciones en su programa de las comunicaciones. Hay varios programas de las comunicaciones en el área de la transferencia directa del programa que visualizan caracteres internacionales correctamente.

By my decent (but not truly fluent) Spnaish, it looks comprehensible as it stands. A few of remarks.

"Usted" should always be capitalized.

"Inusuales" should be "no usuales".

I would say "cambia las configuraciones" rather than "controle las configuraciones".

I think the last phrase would be more natural as "que visualizan correctamente los caracteres internacionales."


-----Original Message-----
From:	Rod Clark [SMTP:bb615 at scn.org]
Sent:	Monday, January 19, 1998 8:12 AM
To:	scn at scn.org
Subject:	SCN in Spanish

   SCN's pages are readable in Spanish, along with other English 
language pages on the Web, with Alta Vista's language 
translation service. The results are mixed, but are usually 
usable enough that people can figure out what the pages say.

   Could someone who knows Spanish well have a look at the blurb 
about this on the SCN home page, and make sure it all makes 
sense? It should be comprehensible, but after unbending the more 
obvious snafus in Alta Vista's translation, there may still be 
some errors, and I'm not particularly fluent in Spanish. 

Rod
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From douglas  Mon Jan 19 22:26:57 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 22:26:57 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Special Event
Message-ID: <199801200626.WAA12963@scn.org>

This Wednesday!!!!!!!!!

==================================================
Please forward to appropriate people and lists
==================================================



                            Happy New Year!!!
 
 
 Join CPSR (and SCNA) in welcoming Peter Royce of Vancouver
 CommunityNet (BC, Canada). 
 
 All welcome!
 
*************************************************************************
 
                            CPSR/Seattle
 
           Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
 
 
                             Presents
 
 
                       A talk by Peter Royce
 
                      Vancouver CommunityNet
 
 
       (co-sponsored by Seattle Community Network Association)
 
 
 
                      Wednesday - January 21
 
                         7:00  - 9:00 pm 
 
        (arrive at 6:30 for socializing and refreshments)


           University Friends Meeting, Social Hall
 
           4001 9th Ave. NE  (Seattle's U-district)
 
 
***************************************************************************
 
 Peter Royce has been working with democratic media projects for over a
 decade. He currently coordinates Vancouver CommunityNet. He's also a
 regular community radio broadcaster, co-op housing advocate and
 commmunity gardener.
 
 Vancouver CommunityNet started as Vancouver FreeNet in 1994 and was
 granted charitable status in a landmark appeal court decision. They
 recently worked with the People's Summit on APEC to help build an online
 component for the Summit. Other current projects include outreach to the
 Spanish speaking community and working with local groups to design a
 coordinated website to highlight issues and solutions for an ecologically
 responsible and socially just vision for the Vancouver region.
 
 Mark your calendar for this very special event. See you there!
 

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From steve at accessone.com  Tue Jan 20 23:06:20 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 23:06:20 -0800
Subject: Email - flame vs threat
Message-ID: <199801210706.XAA22624@accessone.com>

E-Mail Trial May Set U.S. Precedent

NY Times 1/21/98


When the second Federal trial of a man who sent an angry e-mail
message to Asian university students starts in Santa Ana, Calif.,
next week, the jurors will be addressing a tough question: What kind
of behavior is appropriate - and legal - on the Internet? 

Richard Machado, a 20-year-old Los Angeles man, was charged with 10
counts of civil rights violations after he sent an e-mail message to
59 students with Asian-sounding names at the University of California
at Irvine. His case is the nation's first Federal prosecution of an
alleged hate crime on the Internet. 

The issue of whether Machado's message was a real threat or a
"classic flame" serves as the focus of a case that will help define
how authorities respond to threats on the Internet. Prosecutors are
using the case to gauge whether juries take e-mailed threats
seriously. 

"We need to decide what it takes to successfully prosecute a case
like that," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael J. Gennaco,
co-prosecutor on the case and a specialist in civil rights cases.
"There's always a gray area between distasteful messages and threats.
There's a line to be drawn from what we can successfully prosecute.
The lessons learned from this case will guide our office." 

Machado's message said, in part, "I personally will make it my life
carreer [sic] to find and kill everyone of you personally." The
e-mail was signed "Asian Hater." Machado could face a maximum of 10
years in Federal prison if jurors convict him on the charges of
interfering with the students' civil rights. 

The first trial ended in mistrial when jurors deadlocked in November,
voting 9 to 3 for Machado's acquittal. They were snagged on the issue
of whether Machado intended the e-mail as a prank or as a serious
threat. 

Machado's lawyer, Deputy U.S. Public Defender Sylvia Torres-Guillen,
depicted her client in the first trial as a distraught teen-ager who
played a dumb prank. The defendant, who was 19 when he sent the
message, flunked out of the university after his oldest brother was
killed in a carjacking in Los Angeles. The younger Machado was the
first in his family to go to college and did not tell them he had
flunked out. So he continued to have another brother drive him to the
campus every day. Machado sat in the computer lab each day, and in
September 1996, he sent the message. 

This case serves as a gauge, Gennaco said, because of the large number
of people who received the message and because the message contained a
clearly stated threat. The outcome will give guidance to Gennaco's
office in Los Angeles on whether to proceed with prosecutions in three
or four more allegations of threats on the Internet. 

Nationwide, Justice Department officials are investigating similar
accusations. The Machado case is being watched from Washington for
the potential message it sends to the public. 

"The issue is, if there's an acquittal, will it embolden people?"
said a Justice Department official in Washington who spoke on
condition of anonymity. "One thing that will be helpful [in the event
of conviction] is that word will get out that people have a place to
take complaints. The contrary message could get out that there's no
place to take complaints." 

If the jury decides Machado's message was a threat, First Amendment
protections of free speech would not apply. Because of that
component, advocates of free speech in cyberspace have not jumped to
Machado's defense. 

"It's not a case of somebody being prosecuted for flaming," said Mike
Godwin, a fellow at the Media Studies Center in New York and staff
counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based
organization that advocates for civil liberties on the Internet. "If
he'd put it up on a Web site and somebody prosecuted him, I'd probably
be on the plane to defend him." 

The distinction, Godwin said, is that the message was delivered to
people personally. That distinction, he said, makes the Internet
component of the case secondary because the action was like sending a
threatening letter in the mail. 

Another expert said the significance of the case lies in how the
system responds to such actions. Carey Heckman, a consulting
professor at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Stanford Law
and Technology Policy Center, said the case is a sign of society's
adjustment to technology. 

"With new technologies, how do we gauge new behavior on it? How do we
evaluate it?" he said. "I think on the Net, there are those who take
the position that somehow e-mail is a different thing. Where should
you place an e-mail on the spectrum of what you should reasonably be
concerned about?" 

Perhaps people don't take e-mail as seriously as a death threat by
phone, Heckman said. He considered the nine jurors in the first trial
who voted for acquittal. 

"There's something here with these nine citizens who are not thinking
of this situation with the same seriousness," he said. 

The remaining issue, in the event of a conviction, would be assessing
appropriate punishment. Godwin, while he sees merit in the
Government's case, described the prosecution of Machado as
"opportunistic." 

"It's quite clear that some of the speech he was engaged in was
wrong," Godwin said, "but I don't know if sending him to prison for
10 years is the answer." 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company 


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From douglas  Wed Jan 21 09:25:34 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 09:25:34 -0800 (PST)
Subject: "Connecting All Americans for the 21st Century"
Message-ID: <199801211725.JAA25743@scn.org>


There is an upcoming conference February 24 - 26 in Washington, DC
called "Connecting All Americans for the 21st Century" that is
presented by the US Department of Commerce National Telecommunications
Administration (NTIA) and the Public Utility Law Project (PULP) in
Albany, NY.  There will also be a post-conference workshop entitled
"Building Community Networks on the 27th.  My sense is that it very
policy oriented (rather than social activist or grassroots like SCN)
but it might be useful for an SCN board member or other volunteer to
attend.  Their web site is http://www.pulpny.org/CAM.  The fee is $100
for non-profits and government people; $175 otherwise.

-- Doug

PS.  I'm not angling to go!


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From douglas  Wed Jan 21 09:46:00 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 09:46:00 -0800 (PST)
Subject: CNs and Public Television
Message-ID: <199801211746.JAA02953@scn.org>


Ti & Nancy,

Here is a note from Jillaine at the Benton Foundation.  You may want 
to drop her a line.  

-- Doug



Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 19:56:47 -0500
From: Jillaine Smith <jillaine at benton.org>
To: COMMUNET at list.uvm.edu
Cc: afcn-advisory at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: CNs and Public Television/Radio

Greetings friends in the community networking world...

We here at Benton are looking for examples/models of projects that involve
community networks working in partnership with public television or radio.

I am also looking for instances where community networks had real
involvement with engaging their communities in a civic "public interest" or
"public service" issue.  This could be something like Minn. E-Democracy, but
I want it to include partnership with another community entity, be it a
library, public broadcasting or other entity.

Could you please let me know of current or even past projects and
the best people to contact regarding those projects?

I hope I'm being clear enough.

Thanks!

-- Jillaine Smith
   Senior Associate
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Benton Foundation	                             www.benton.org
1634 Eye Street NW - 11th floor	                voice: 202/638-5770 
Washington DC 20006	                          fax: 202/638-5771


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From douglas  Wed Jan 21 10:13:11 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 10:13:11 -0800 (PST)
Subject: more on the statewide plan for libraries
Message-ID: <199801211813.KAA10678@scn.org>


Here is another piece of information from Bruce McComb in the Tri Cities.
Maybe now is a good time for SCN volunteers to set up a meeting with
SPL?!

-- Doug

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 15:09:50 +0500 
Subject: State Library Input
To: douglas at scn.org

To all Washington Community Networks:

The RECA Foundation is the Washington State Representative for 
Community Networks on the Statewide Plan for Washington Libraries.

Our input from the last planning meeting can be reviewed on our web
site at:

                  http://www.tcfn.org/recafnd/1stqtr98/1stqtr98.html

The letter provides a good review of our plans for a Regional
Dissabilites 
Resource Center as well as the integration of Computer Technology 
Centers into the library system.

 Bruce McComb, Executive Director
                                RECA FOUNDATION
                   605 South Olympia #74  Kennewick, Wa 99336
                Phone:  (509) 543-2910  e-mail:  sysop at tcfn.org
                                        
                                         PROGRAMS
* TCFN     The Columbia Free-Net, Modem: (509) 543-2900,
telnet://tcfn.org,                 http://www.tcfn.org

* CBPIN    Columbia Basin Public Information Network
                   http://www.tcfn.org/cbpin.htm
Founding members:  Arts Council of the Mid-Columbia Region, BOSS
Internet Group, Educational Service District 123, Franklin County,
Mid-Columbia Library, NW Public Television, Washington State University
Cooperative Extension, and Tri-Cities Free-Net (TCFN)

"The old America strove to assimilate difference, The new America will 
find strength in valuing diversity."



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From douglas  Wed Jan 21 10:19:50 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 10:19:50 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Call for papers -- community networks
Message-ID: <199801211819.KAA12756@scn.org>

FYI..

-- Doug


----------------------------------------------------
Can be distributed to appropriate people and lists
----------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 19:41:34 -0600
To: DOUGLAS at scn.org
Subject: EJC/REC Call for papers
From: "Joe Schmitz" <schmitzja at webzone.net>

                         Call for papers

A special issue of the Electronic Journal of Communications/La
Revue Electronicque de Communication [EJC/REC] will examine
community [electronic] networks.  

While community networks are being created at an exponential
rate, scholarly research about them remains quite sparse. 
Although much has been written about the Internet, fewer
researchers have studied community networks.  The rapid
development of these distinctive and diverse new communication
systems invites study, analysis, and interpretation.  We seek
contributions that are theoretically grounded and
methodologically introspective--from a wide range of disciplinary
perspectives.  Papers with quantitative and/or qualitative
analyses are particularly welcome.  We especially seek papers
that contribute developing theories that link electronic media to
geographically-centered communities and address the multiple
levels of analysis that "community" entails.  Specific topics
might include but are not limited to:

�    Exemplars of theoretical and/or methodological approaches to
     study community networks
�    Technological and social determinants of community networks
�    Community networks, social structure, community outcomes
�    Democracy, equity, and community networks
�    Community networks, information outcomes, and social change
�    Political processes, stakeholder interests, and community   networks
�    Community network as alternate communication systems
�    Legal, policy, and normative issues for community networks
�    Community network comparisons

This special issue is scheduled for publication during mid 1999. 
Submissions are requested by August 15, 1998 that they may
undergo blind review.  Manuscripts should follow either the APA
Manual [4th ed.] or the MLA Handbook [3rd ed.].  Send manuscripts
for review in 4 paper copies to either of the following
coeditors.  Both editors welcome inquiries regarding this call
for papers.  Authors might review the EJC/REC at:
http://www.cios.org/www/ejcmain.htm.

Joseph Schmitz                Lori Collins-Jarvis
schmitzja at utulsa.edu          collinsj at usc.edu
Faculty of Communication      Annenberg School of Communication
University of Tulsa           University of Southern California
600 S. College Ave.           3502 Watt Way
Tulsa OK 74104-3189           Los Angeles, CA 900-0281

Joseph Schmitz, Ph.D.
University of Tulsa
918 631-3810
918 631-3809 [fax]

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From carlp at cpsr.org  Sun Jan 25 14:43:53 1998
From: carlp at cpsr.org (Carl B. Page)
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 14:43:53 -0800
Subject: New Years Greetings 
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19980125144353.03795ee0@mail.accessone.com>

(sent to CPSR NW members and freinds from CPSR ( Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility ) 	http://www.cpsr.org) 

CONTENTS 
	GREETING 
	MICROCREDIT CHAMPION SPEAKS 1/30/98  
	FFTF 
	WEBMANAGERS WANTED 


A Greeting from the CPSR NorthWest Director, Carl Page. 

A belated Happy New Years to you all.  

1998 promises to be an important one.  As the internet becomes mainstream, cyberspace property rights are being established.  Will free speech and efficient publishing and searching continue to be available, or will the virtual equivalent of barbed wire encircle the net?   The US Government and other governments will wrestle with the environment of free speech and tax free commerce the net has created.  CPSR will be involved.  For an attempt to define principles that justify public interest involvement in electronic infastructure policy see the unfolding OneNet manifesto at http://www.cpsr.org/program/nii/onenetindex.html

I've appreciated the chance to serve those of you who have contacted me for one thing or another.   One of my new years resolutions is to try to email all of you monthly with info on CPSR and related Northwest activities. 


WEBMANAGERS WANTED 

Some of you may not know that CPSR has a powerful web server at http://www.cpsr.org.  We need to beef up the content.  We need more info on computers in the workplace (ergonomics, monitoring), employtment in the industry.    We need comments on our new spam page.  http://www.cpsr.org/program/privacy/spam.html

Anybody who is a CPSR member who has content relevant to our mission- we would love to get it up there.  WE NEED YOUR SUGGESTIONS!  Please contact me or webmaster at cpsr.org.   You can also volunteer to edit anything you notice that might be out of date.  We are using a RedHat Linux box with the Apache server so we can deal with almost anybody's web page editing style.   

We also want to use links on our server to call attention to exemplary uses of the net.  Please send me ideas.

MICROCREDIT CHAMPION SPEAKS

Dr. Muhummad Yunus, the "Barefoot Banker" and prominent economist and feminist from Bangladesh will speak at the University of Washington Business School at 6:30 PM on January 20th.  
		Location to be announced. 
		(it should be a fairly large hall).  

Sure to please Libertarians and Socialists alike, 
Dr. Yunus will describe the lessons learned from starting and adapting the MicroCredit concept to grow Grameen, the largest bank in Bangladesh, with 35,000 locations.  If there will ever be a technical solution to the problem of poverty, this is it.  
A bank system to cater to the capital needs of, be run, owned and dominated by the poorest of the poor. 

Note that volunteer opportunities for computer professionals exist with Grameen, which is extending its cellular phone net and building a pilot internet POP in rural Bangladesh, where neither electrical nor telephone service have yet been introduced.  The Grameen Bank could also use support in improving its use of it's 200 PC's, a small number for 35,000 locations.  

Much more information about MicroCredit is available at my web on the issue, http://www.findpage.com/~carlp/microcredit.htm .



FFTF 
More than 500 people filled a SEattle Center meeting room last week to meet with WA Dept of Ecology, and US DoE officials to protest the hot-standby and potential new weapons mission for the Fast Flux Test Facility.  (FFTF) 

As northwest residents we have to be alarmed by the decaying Hanford complex.  Unfortunately it's radiation isn't decaying half as fast as the cleanup dollars are.  In the last three years $100 million dollars have been diverted from the clean-up budget to keep the FFTF reactor on hot standby.  This violates the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA) in which Washington State and the Department of Energy agreed that the mission of Hanford is cleanup.  The plan is to change this research reactor into a Tritium production facility using a new and reactor technology with unusually disasterous potential failure modes.  

Two primary excuses for this corporate welfare have been floated.  First, the need to keep our entire arsenal of thermonuclear warheads working at their maximum potential yeild.  (Modest reductions in the size of the arsenal as proposed in START-2 and 3 can provide more than enough scrap Tritium to keep remaining weapons at full strength.)  

The DOE also is tugging on heartstrings by asserting that there is a medical need for the radioisotopes that could be produced by the modified FFTF.   Two leading University of Washington Radiology researchers have dubunked that idea by pointing out that forigen sources for the needed radioisotopes are reliable.  (As long as we stay freindly with Canada we won't have a shortage.)  Nor, they say, is it conceivable that treatment with Tritium will ever be used for as many as half of US cancer patients, a preposterous proportion the DOE used to emphasize the need.  

The assertion that the reactor is needed for medical purposes is merely a ruse to distract attention from the fact that the reactor program is purely a weapons program that would supply a stream of tritium for a possible resumption of thermonuclear warhead construction 

Currently the Washington State Department of Ecology has the power to reject the plan under the terms of the TPA but isn't planning to.  !!! The Dept of Ecology's public comment period has been extended to February 20th. !!! 

Check out http://www.findpage.com/~carlp/fftf.html for details and links to more information.  

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From carlp at cpsr.org  Tue Jan 27 08:22:25 1998
From: carlp at cpsr.org (Carl B. Page)
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 08:22:25 -0800
Subject: CORRECTION: Dr. Yunus to speak 1/28/98 
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19980127082225.009b3950@mail.accessone.com>

(sent to CPSR NW members and freinds from CPSR ( Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility ) 	http://www.cpsr.org) 

The presentation by Dr. Yunus will be 1/28/98, not 1/30/98 as I previously announced. 

Professor Yunus will be speaking at UW at 6:00PM, Wednesday (1/28) evening in
the Boeing Auditorium, which is Room 110 of the Seafirst Executive Education Center (SEEC) on the North end of the University of Washington campus.   The event is free.  Some parking directions for campus are at http://www.washington.edu/admin/parking/directions/
A map showing the building on campus is at http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/northcentral.html .   The building is at map location 5-7

Dr. Yunus will also be at the World Affairs Human Rights and Development meeting on the evening of the 29th.  This is at the Scottish Right Masonic Temple, 1155 Broadway E.  (Near 10th and E. Highland.  
Map at http://www.mapblast.com/yt.hm?FAM=mapblast&CMD=GEO&SEC=blast&IC=0%3A0%3A8&IC%3A=Masonic+Temple&AD2=1155+Broadway+E&AD3=Seattle+WA+
 
Things will get started with around 5:30 or 6:00.  




DETAILS AGAIN.  

MICROCREDIT CHAMPION SPEAKS 1/28/98  


Dr. Muhummad Yunus, the "Barefoot Banker" and prominent economist and feminist from Bangladesh will speak at the  at 
		6:00 PM on January 28th.  
		Boeing Auditorium.  (SEEC 110) 
		University of Washington Business School

Sure to please Libertarians and Socialists alike, 
Dr. Yunus will describe the lessons learned from starting and adapting the MicroCredit concept to grow Grameen, the largest bank in Bangladesh, with 35,000 locations.  If there will ever be a technical solution to the problem of poverty, this is it.  
A bank system to cater to the capital needs of, be run, owned and dominated by the poorest of the poor. 

Note that volunteer opportunities for computer professionals exist with Grameen, which is extending its cellular phone net and building a pilot internet POP in rural Bangladesh, where neither electrical nor telephone service have yet been introduced.  The Grameen Bank could also use support in improving its use of it's 200 PC's, a small number for 35,000 locations.  

Much more information about MicroCredit is available at my web on the issue, http://www.findpage.com/~carlp/microcredit.htm .




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From bb156 at scn.org  Wed Jan 28 16:29:55 1998
From: bb156 at scn.org (Andrew Higgins)
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 16:29:55 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Six sites now considered for library.
Message-ID: <199801290029.QAA12309@scn.org>


Link: 6 sites now considered for library
 URL: http://www.seattletimes.com/news/local/html98/altlibe_012898.html

--
   ,_____,_____,    6 __      _                                 User: bb156
   T\  :.      .^\,_/_\_|_   /_|   _/_ _     )__/'_ _ '   _   Domain: scn.org  
   I ^T=====;=====T   /|    (  |/)(// (-((/ /  //(/(///)_)    Seattle, WA
      I           I _|_|                        _/_/          
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From steve at accessone.com  Thu Jan 29 00:11:23 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 00:11:23 -0800
Subject: Seniors online
Message-ID: <199801290811.AAA24529@accessone.com>

Web Sites, Other PC Wonders Draw Large Crowds of Retirees

By JIM CARLTON
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 1/29/98


LAGUNA HILLS, Calif. -- Welcome to Leisure World -- retirement
village and launching pad for the Web.

People who live here are wired, in every technological sense of the
word. The local personal-computer-users' group, which numbered 40 in
1994, has exploded to about 1,000 members. Computer-training classes
have no openings until spring.

A computer "gives you an incentive to keep moving around," says
Harry West, a 94-year-old Leisure World resident who uses his PC to
track investments, tour on-line museums and e-mail the
great-grandkids. "I think it's a wonderful thing, about equal to the
telephone in terms of progress."

Leisure World is no anomaly. Packard Bell NEC Inc. reports that in
1997 customers over age 55 accounted for 14% of retail purchases of
its PCs, up from 11.7% the previous year. Last year, 36% of
Americans between ages 50 and 64 owned a PC, up sharply from 27% in
1996, according to surveys by the American Association of Retired
Persons.

People aged 50 and over who have computers use their PCs 14 days a
month, for an average of 130.2 minutes on those days, according to
the PC Meter tracking system of Media Metrix Inc. Their
minutes-per-month total is 47% higher than the average for all age
groups, the New York-based market-research firm says.

That's good news for the industry -- which is scrambling to figure
out how to capitalize on it. "The big challenge of marketing to
seniors is they are so diverse," says Hollie Chriss Cronin, senior
manager of desktop products at AST Computer, the Irvine, Calif.,
unit of Korea's Samsung Group.

Officials of the big PC maker Packard Bell Electronics Inc. in
Sacramento, Calif., say they have only recently begun holding focus
groups with older people to formulate a marketing strategy for them.
Packard Bell, along with other manufacturers, has also been in
discussions with Microsoft to devise a marketing campaign for
software that might appeal to the older user.

One pioneer in this field is WebTV Networks Inc. of Palo Alto,
Calif., the Microsoft unit that developed Internet-access terminals
for television. Soon after the WebTV box was launched in 1996, the
advertising campaign included this radio spot of an elderly woman
reading aloud an e-mail to her son: "No, I didn't get a computer. I
still do not know what a gigabyte is. I got WebTV. I just push a
button on the remote and, voila, the Internet is on my TV. And son,
I plugged it in myself."

WebTV officials say they targeted older people early on as potential
users of the new device. "We assumed older people would gravitate to
being able to communicate with family members, especially," says
Colleen Bertiglia, WebTV's director of marketing. She says WebTV
plans to distribute the boxes in places such as retirement homes and
hospitals where high numbers of the elderly are concentrated.

The marketing opportunities are even greater on the Internet, where
a number of sites have sprung up that appeal directly to older users.
A site called thirdage.com, for instance, was set up in 1996 as a
clearinghouse for information of special interest to older people,
such as retirement housing and estate management. The site touts
various chat rooms and discussion forums on the order of "The Empty
Nest: Peace and Quiet or Deafening Silence?"

Thirdage.com has become so popular that it draws an estimated
250,000 visitors a month -- or a cybercity the size of Anaheim,
Calif., according to the PC Meter.

Mary Furlong, chairman, chief executive and founder of Third Age
Media Inc., the San Francisco company that runs thirdage.com,
envisions this kind of site as the electronic equivalent of a small
town. "People no longer connect on the front porch, so I created
this for an on-line sense of place and community," says Ms. Furlong,
who previously founded another on-line site for the elderly called
SeniorNet. "With the Internet, they never have to be lonely."

Or bored. In Leisure World, 76-year-old Joe Schwarz, a retired
electronics engineer who is one of the community's volunteer PC
instructors, says, "I asked the question one day to some people in
our PC training class, "How many of you are up at four in the
morning and can't go to sleep? All hands shot up. I said, 'Get on the
Internet.' "

And are they ever. Retired surgeon Sidney Sacks, 84, estimates he
spends four hours each day surfing the Web from his Leisure World
home. Dr. Sacks, originally from South Africa, retired in the U.S.
two decades ago but is still able to keep up with the news from home
by scanning on-line copies of his favorite South African newspapers,
the Cape Times and the Johannesburg Zanow.

"It all gives me a great thrill, and it keeps me occupied every
day," Dr. Sacks says excitedly. And after he's through, his wife,
Hildred, seizes the keyboard and spends her computer time creating
electronic greeting cards of varying designs and colors. Then she
goes on-line to send them to friends and family, all over the world.

Leisure Worlder Clara Rapp, a retired teacher, relies on her PC to
clear up all the accounting mistakes she used to make in her
checkbook. "I was always off by a few dollars," says the
77-year-old. "Now, I get it down to the last zero." A neighbor,
81-year-old Betty Kasel, has taken up digital painting. "I've got a
17-inch screen," Ms. Kasel says proudly, adding with a sigh: "I've
only got a Pentium 133, and it's almost too slow now."

With the aging Baby Boomers right behind today's retirees, an even
greater explosion in the number of older PC users is expected in the
years ahead. The Census Bureau projects the number of people above
age 55 increasing to 27.5% of the total U.S. population by the year
2015 from about 21% now.

Leisure World's Mr. Schwarz, walking at a brisk pace as he leads a
tour of the growing computing facilities at the community, is a bit
wistful about such projections. "My only regret," he says, "is that
I won't be here 50 years from now to see where all this technology
goes."

Copyright c 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 


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From steve at accessone.com  Thu Jan 29 01:03:04 1998
From: steve at accessone.com (Steve Hoffman)
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 01:03:04 -0800
Subject: Web pages that suck
Message-ID: <199801290904.BAA26924@accessone.com>

A fun (and possibly instructive) site -

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com

"The purpose of this web site is to help people design effective and
aesthetically pleasing web pages. My methodology is somewhat
different -- I firmly believe that if a person is exposed to bad web
page design they'll be less likely to use these techniques in the
pages they create. People often commit the same mistakes over and
over and over and over -- you get the point. By pointing out these
mistakes, and being told that they are mistakes, you can avoid them
when you design your web pages."

- Vincent Flanders
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From ljbeedle at scn.org  Thu Jan 29 05:57:03 1998
From: ljbeedle at scn.org (Lois Beedle)
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 05:57:03 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Seniors online
In-Reply-To: <199801290811.AAA24529@accessone.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980129055212.4226K-100000@scn>

You don't have to go to Leisure World or California to see seniors in
action as most of you know.  I have been working with seniors for several
years in learning the basics of computers.  They have to unlearn some
things but most are quick to learn all the things they want to know.  I
also was a tester for ThirdAge and am still a part of it.
While any age can sign up, it's geared towards 50 and older. The Tech
Central is a hotbed of activity and questions, and answers.
Recently a space - forum - was created to learn html, including a practice
area.
It is mostly text accessible, there are still a few places where the html
code is faulty, and with lynx you miss most of the ads.
Thanks for passing the article on Steve.
Lois
If you put chocolate in your coffee, it doesn't put on weight.

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From mtsvme at scn.org  Thu Jan 29 20:49:54 1998
From: mtsvme at scn.org (SCN User)
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 20:49:54 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Gates Library Foundation & TRI
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980129204640.1349A-100000@scn>

Has anyone heard of Technology Resource Institute?  (www.tripl.org)

It seems to be copying scn, only with $$$ from Bill & Melinda (Gates
Library Foundation).

It seems they are putting libraries online, including libraries in the
Seattle area, and bringing the internet to low-income areas.

I'm open to comments/information/etc.

Thanx

Thomas

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From douglas  Fri Jan 30 12:40:17 1998
From: douglas (Doug Schuler)
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 12:40:17 -0800 (PST)
Subject: call for papers (FYI)
Message-ID: <199801302040.MAA01300@scn.org>


FYI,


                         Call for papers

A special issue of the Electronic Journal of Communications/La
Revue Electronicque de Communication [EJC/REC] will examine
community [electronic] networks.  

While community networks are being created at an exponential
rate, scholarly research about them remains quite sparse. 
Although much has been written about the Internet, fewer
researchers have studied community networks.  The rapid
development of these distinctive and diverse new communication
systems invites study, analysis, and interpretation.  We seek
contributions that are theoretically grounded and
methodologically introspective--from a wide range of disciplinary
perspectives.  Papers with quantitative and/or qualitative
analyses are particularly welcome.  We especially seek papers
that contribute developing theories that link electronic media to
geographically-centered communities and address the multiple
levels of analysis that "community" entails.  Specific topics
might include but are not limited to:

�    Exemplars of theoretical and/or methodological approaches to
     study community networks
�    Technological and social determinants of community networks
�    Community networks, social structure, community outcomes
�    Democracy, equity, and community networks
�    Community networks, information outcomes, and social change
�    Political processes, stakeholder interests, and community   networks
�    Community network as alternate communication systems
�    Legal, policy, and normative issues for community networks
�    Community network comparisons

This special issue is scheduled for publication during mid 1999. 
Submissions are requested by August 15, 1998 that they may
undergo blind review.  Manuscripts should follow either the APA
Manual [4th ed.] or the MLA Handbook [3rd ed.].  Send manuscripts
for review in 4 paper copies to either of the following
coeditors.  Both editors welcome inquiries regarding this call
for papers.  Authors might review the EJC/REC at:
http://www.cios.org/www/ejcmain.htm.

Joseph Schmitz                Lori Collins-Jarvis
schmitzja at utulsa.edu          collinsj at usc.edu
Faculty of Communication      Annenberg School of Communication
University of Tulsa           University of Southern California
600 S. College Ave.           3502 Watt Way
Tulsa OK 74104-3189           Los Angeles, CA 900-0281

Joseph Schmitz, Ph.D.
University of Tulsa
918 631-3810
918 631-3809 [fax]

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From bb615 at scn.org  Sat Jan 31 07:54:54 1998
From: bb615 at scn.org (Rod Clark)
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 1998 15:54:54 +0000
Subject: (Fwd) children
Message-ID: <199801312355.PAA00395@scn4.scn.org>

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date:          Sat, 31 Jan 1998 17:31:19 -0600
From:          Marjorie Stradinger <stradinger at stateline-il.com>
Reply-to:      stradinger at stateline-il.com
To:            webmaster at scn.org
Subject:       children

Hi

Do you have any information on comparing children who are in day care to
children who have a stay-at-home parent?

I am doing a research paper on this topic and need some quotes and
statistics.

Thank you.

Michaell Stradinger
stradinger at stateline-il.com
-- 
MZ



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