PEN

[Steve]

Santa Monica Seeking a Return To Online Civic Forum of Yore

Rebecca Fairley Raney
NY Times 9/7/98


SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- When Santa Monica City Hall first offered
online forums nine years ago, the major topic of discussions in this
upscale community was the homeless. When citizens sought ways to
help people get jobs, Donald Paschal, who was logging on from a
public terminal, offered advice from a unique perspective. 

Paschal had been known to the online group of city officials and
residents as an articulate, thoughtful writer. 

He would like to get a job, Paschal wrote, but he was dirty, he had
nowhere to wash his clothes and nowhere to store his belongings. He
was, in fact, homeless. People were astonished. They organized to
help their online compatriot. 

Soon, they created a program called Swashlock, for showers, washers
and lockers. 

That was in 1989. It took four years to fully organize Swashlock,
but the program has thrived in the five years since. 

It was the first major civic initiative of the online group,
officially known as the Santa Monica Public Electronic Network, or
PEN. It was an experiment in electronic democracy that after nine
years has become a widely studied model for scholars and municipal
officials searching for ways to use online tools to foster
citizenship. 

PEN started as an electronic bulletin board, a pre-Internet
technology that allowed owners of computers with modems to read
material posted by others and to send and receive text messages. 

The rapid spread of the Internet since 1994 expanded those early
efforts and accelerated the city's progress. Issues that were being
tackled in the city nearly a decade ago -- online outreach,
community information and services, equal access and universal e-mail
-- are now drawing national attention. 

"Any government that is moving into digital democracy would be well
advised to look at Santa Monica," said Tora Bikson, a senior
scientist at Rand, the research institution, who has used the city
as a case study. "It was the first." 

These days while outsiders seek the city's counsel, however, local
officials are struggling to recapture the enthusiasm that surrounded
the network in its early days and to stimulate dwindling online
discussions. 

They have a strong incentive: Santa Monica lost a major public forum
last March, when the Copley Newspapers chain shut down The Outlook,
the only daily newspaper in this city of 90,000 people. 

Santa Monica, city officials say, is uniquely suited to fill that
void with online forums. Fifty percent of the households here have
Internet access, and nearly 1 in 10 residents is a registered user
of PEN. 

This beach city's tradition of online politics sprouted largely
because of its unusual demographics and history of contentious
politics. Residents are affluent and very well-educated. The median
household income was $51,000 in 1990, according to census figures,
which also show that 19 percent of residents over age 25 held
graduate degrees, about twice the rate in the rest of California. 

The city is also a hotbed of grass-roots activism. It takes a year
to design a park because of the months of hearings that the residents
demand. City Council meetings typically run until midnight. Citizens
have plenty to talk about because the city has a $6 million surplus.
They are divided over how to allocate it. 

For the first time this year, the city took public comments on the
budget by e-mail. Officials received more than 100 messages, copies
of which went to the City Council members and heads of city
departments. The e-mail, for the most part, came from people never
seen at public meetings. Their suggestions included increasing
spending for the arts, making the city a "model new media community"
with a fiber optic grid and encouraging recreation. 

"Keep roller hockey alive and well in Santa Monica," one
correspondent demanded. 

For all its celebrated success, Santa Monica's network has also
found itself on the frontier of some of the less appealing terrain of
cyberspace. Once a prankster got loose in PEN, logged on as the head
of a utility department and sent an e-mail message to a councilman
threatening to shut off his electricity. That incident prompted the
network's project manager, Keith Kurtz, to institute a new rule that
is now considered an online must: Users' passwords must be different
from their names. 

In the early days of the online venture, city employees were
reluctant to respond to residents by e-mail. 

By 1992, e-mail had caught on so well that city attorneys felt it
necessary to warn City Council members not to engage in substantive
discussion among themselves by e-mail for fear of violating the
state's public meetings law. 

But now the city's online forum is suffering from a much-studied
phenomenon: the decay of online discussion. It is an issue that has
taken on heightened importance among local politicians since the
demise of the newspaper. 

"Everyone in Santa Monica politics got up first thing in the morning
and read The Outlook's letters to the editor," said City Councilman
Ken Genser, who has beena City Councilmanfor 10 years. "That's
missing. Maybe this can help fill some of that gap." 

Discussion also faded in PEN partly because the city's forums became
plagued by personal attacks and ranting. 

The stock remedy for this problem is to moderate the discussion. But
as a government agency, the city faces a quandary: Should officials
leave the forums unchecked and run the risk that a few obnoxious
people will kill the discussion, or should they moderate to keep the
discussion alive and inevitably face accusations of censorship? 

City officials announced a test solution on Sept. 1. They said the
League of Women Voters had agreed to moderate the PEN forums on
candidates and issues through the November election. The next step,
city officials say, depends on what happens with the moderated
forums. 

Many residents say they hope that interest in the city election will
revive participation in the online forum. They say they are
convinced that PEN is a vital component of local politics. Its early
successes in creating equal access to policy makers on line have not
been forgotten, nor has the homeless man who so influenced PEN's
early days. 

Paschal left the city years ago and became a cable talk-show
hostwent on to serve as the host of a talk show on cable television
in the San Fernando Valley. B, but he kept his PEN account. I in
1995, he logged on and left a message on PEN for his old friends in
Santa Monica. "Just call me EX-homeless," it said. 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company 

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