Community building…. ??

Unstructured thoughts….

The idea that community-building is a by-product of network building…

How does forgr fit into the community model I’ve been on about?  It is emplaced: even in its very name–forgr.  It is a “community of interest” or a club or service provider–connecting those with something to those who want something, but it is more than transactional in that it requires members to be giving back… the dance club… come in knowing nothing… learn from those who have been there… teach those who come after you… and when the band packs up at the end of the evening and the dancing is done… go out for food and talk about topics other than the dance steps…

That’s where the community building happens… not in the “this is a computer, this is a track pad, e-mail works like this, and you can protect yourself from on-line predation with a few simple steps…”  That’s transactional… learning to dance is transactional… teaching someone to dance is the edge between transactional and community… dancing with someone is community… Helping someone attach a picture to an e-mail is the edge between tranactional and community… Learning to shop on-line is transactional… learning to create a blog is on the edge between transactional and community… Creating a map of maple trees on your block with CommunityWalk and sharing it to discuss, say, “nature in the city,” on a blog, or in a discussion group or comment thread is community-building…

Giving people access to these tools is network building… connecting people by threads of interest… needs and desires defined in a way to create a common language…

The network is abstract, and can connect interests… the community is the people in the place… connecting their humanity…

More… what if the networks don’t connect at all or hardly worth talking about…?

Thoughts on the invisible.

In a previous post, I noted that there are some elements of a community which are invisible to other components. As I was writing, I claimed this is as it should be. And I still believe this, but Marie-Claire made a really important point in her comment.

When I made my initial comments, I was thinking of networks and individuals with different interests from one another. I suspect there is a softball league in Grand Rapids, and I suspect there has been one for decades, but it was invisible to me as an individual, and it was invisible to me in terms of the networks I was a part of. I was a news reader on a radio service for blind people for several years. This is a service which is invisible to most residents of Grand Rapids, and one which the vast majority of Grand Rapids residents wouldn’t even imagine. I’m sure there are similar things I can’t imagine. Things which add to the quality of life of the community directly, and through the interconnections of networks the individuals create by participating.

On the other hand, there are people who are invisible in a negative way. The have limited access to networks. They have limited access to the community. Some are in a category we called “shut-ins” when I was younger, and connected to a few different do-gooder networks. We’d go over and rake the lawn, and visit for a while. We were teenagers, so we didn’t do much really helpful, like run errands, get them out of the house, and so on.

Internet connectivity can help with the social needs of people who are disconnected from their community. Absolutely. However, such connectivity cannot substitute for real, live human contact. It can make it easier to get… but it can make it more difficult to vet.

And there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here. If somone is disconnected from community, how does that person get use internet access to get connected to the community? It’s a problem which has never been fully resolved. I doubt it ever will be finally resolved. I suspect that the internet doesn’t even bring us materially closer to a resolution. Here’s why. Every technology adds opportunities for connection. But the history of community growth seems to be that as communities get bigger and more complex, there are more gaps for people to fall through.

It’s better to have more opportunities for connection.  There should be no doubt about that.

But opportunities for connection cannot be a substitute for emplacement in a geographic place.  The connections made available contribute to a community.  This cannot be denied, and I would not want to deny the contribution.

A community is made of place, people with connections of interest, and–probably most important–the human connection which goes beyond the club (dance group, softball league, work environment) which helps out, takes care of each other, and cares.

How this blog got started…

A couple of months ago, a friend asked a series of questions about Grand Rapids’ proposed municipal wireless.  He sent me a few links.  I read them, and thought for a bit, and here’s what I wrote back to him–lightly edited.  It’s not so much about what Grand Rapids is actually doing, as it is about why anyone would want to try to do what Grand Rapids might be trying to do.  It’s long, so watch out.

—–

Scott,

 

Let me see if I’ve got the questions and concerns down:

 

 

• Municipal wireless networks might be a boondoggle, like a monorail (which is the word I’ll be using as shorthand for that sort of thing).

• When originally proposed, it was pitched as free.

• The police are going to use the network (is there a concern that this will limit private access, but otherwise, I don’t fully realize what they’re doing).

• You expressed an enthusiasm for the portable communications technology. You called it the best compass there ever was.

• Of what does the relationship between communications and technology consist?

• Can/how can a local communications network strengthen a local community and economy?

• Can a mediated communications model be good for society and/or culture?

 

 

What I see here is a couple of general questions: can a municipal wireless communications be made to work for the public good? And what is the public good anyway, and how does it relate to methods of communication?

 

 

Municipal wireless networks are a strange sort of thing, and we live in a strange sort of time. I’ll be working this through by a handful of analogies: traditional infrastructure (like roads and water pipes), and other communications systems. Here’s the short of it. Municipal wireless communications networks probably will be workable, and they probably will be good for local development (both social and economic). But, people being people, there will be problems and failures to live up to potentials. 

 

 

Is city-wide high-speed internet access a good thing? First, the glib reply to get it out of the way: it’s a very good thing for vendors of hardware, and it’s a pretty good thing for sellers of bandwidth and spectrum; it’s a potentially very useful thing for the business of a city (public safety, and other in-field data transmissions), though from that point of view it’s still a very good thing for vendors. Is it a good thing for every-day citizens? Let’s focus on small business owners and moderate to low income residents, since I feel this is who you’re talking about. (By the way, moderate and low income are technical terms. The income levels for these terms vary by county, and are set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.)

 

 

Actually, I’d like to come back in a moment to why it’s not totally a glib reply.

 

 

First though, a few thoughts on the difference between critical infrastructure and monorails (shorthand for a certain type of public project). Local governments install critical infrastructure–roads are the classic example–because people need what the infrastructure provides. Sometimes, like with streetcars or other mass transit, the local government doesn’t go directly into the business. They might sell franchises allowing private firms to use public assets (the road right-of-way), or they might create a semiautonomous authority. Another type of critical infrastructure are utilities like electricity and water/sewer. One hundred years ago, municipal power was pretty common. Even today, the City of Grand Haven is served by a municipal power board. It’s attached to the grid, just like everything else, but you pay for power from a local public body running a local plant. In Michigan, water systems are publicly run–either locally or regionally. Financially, they’re run separately from the ordinary budget of the city (called the General Fund) by a tool called an Enterprise Fund, and they have to run their own surpluses. You can’t legally support a water distribution system through taxes. You support them through user fees which should be listed by type on your water bill–usually the commodity price (of the water itself) and the debt repayment (for putting the pipes in originally).

 

 

Monorails are things which look like critical infrastructure, but which don’t provide something people need.  (As I’m using the word, monorails are all sorts of public projects.  In some cities, for instance, building things like sports stadia to support the Olympics are monorail projects.)  They cost a ton to install, but can’t operate by generating enough fees to pay for themselves. Now, of course, roads don’t pay for themselves at all, but as a society we’ve come to agree that we’ll pay for roads through a variety of taxes; general fund, gas taxes, etc. Which is fine; we can make those sorts of social decisions, that’s why we have politics.  Some places have user fees–toll roads. Monorails don’t supply a fine enough grain of service delivery–roads, electric lines, water, and successful mass transit each go pretty much anywhere. Olympic natatoria pretty much don’t.  You usually have to walk between a little way and a couple of blocks to get to a mass transit site, which is why mass transit needs public subsidies in addition to user fees (bus lines are more flexible and less expensive than rail lines, which is why there are more of them). Roads are more heavily subsidized than mass transit, but socially, we’re a lot more excited about roads (individual autonomy, and because roads help define private property) than about mass transit (often perceived as used by faintly distasteful people who can’t/won’t drive cars).

 

 

So, is city-wide wireless internet service a monorail or is it critical infrastructure? Most critical infrastructure is capital investment–roads, pipes, utility poles, wires, buses, trains. As you know, network hardware–especially when it’s out in the open–lasts for a while, but not nearly as long as traditional infrastructure elements. Does computer hardware or do networks last 5 to 20 years? Probably not. Even if one is made from robust workhorse components (dot matrix printers, 2400 baud modems), the increased capabilities we expect from networks over time outstrip their capacity, often well within their potential service lifetimes. How many people have ever dialed into the Internet on a 2400 baud modem?  I did, about 12 years ago.  Now, even though you can, you would be hard-pressed to find anything you could access in a useful length of time.  Why, it would take hours to load even this web page.  The need for constant replacement of property in the open, and for regular investment in new, faster, more-throughput gear feels like something other than critical infrastructure to me.

 

 

But, like critical infrastructure, wireless goes everywhere, which may be more important.  After all, a lot of delivery networks have components in the open. Wireless can provide a very, very fine grain of service delivery.  Also, municipalities often explain the need for city-wide wireless networks in terms of serving underserved communities. (This is why cable television companies go into neighborhoods where they might not make as much profit as they’d like. In order to get the franchise to use public infrastructure to run their lines (utility poles or road right-of-way for underground wires), they have to agree to go everywhere–to serve the underserved.) Another way to explain the need for these networks is to tie them to public safety, health, and efficient delivery of public service.

 

 

Generally, I roll my eyes when people start talking about how the internet is different from everything else, and how it’s going to change everything. However, as a municipal public service, it does seem to be different from a lot of other things, so, in thinking about this, I want to back up to purposes rather than dwell too much on the hardware aspect.

 

 

If we agree it’s a public purpose, then we’ll find a way to make it work. Probably. This has up sides and down sides, and helps explain why it seems to take so long to install.  So far the technology isn’t robust enough to solve the property in the open/delivery grain equation.  It’s getting close, which we can tell because some communities have installed it already.  WiMax seems to hold the potential for really delivering.  We’ll see.  The point is that the technology evolves so fast that the answer to making it work is probably going to be developed within just a few years from now.  Which, honestly, is within about 20 years of the internet going from University and military use to household uses.  Enthusiasm, which is natural, generated by the speed of development of this technology can turn pretty quickly to frustration when municipalities hesitate to deploy it.  But the comparison here might be to the difference between having an AS/400 with some dumb terminals but then not deploying Windows workstations to every cubicle for years.  If you get a certain technology early, you may not be able to afford the more flexible technology later–or adapt your processes to the new technology.

 

 

So why, really, do we want wireless internet as a public service? It’s actually difficult to say. We have never, as a society, decided that communications technology demands public operations. There are (to my knowledge) no municipally operated phone companies nor (to my knowledge) CATV companies. There have been some municipal broadcast stations, but not many. We require commercial communications firms to serve underserved communities. In addition to CATV franchise requirements, telephone bills still have a federal Universal Service Fee for rural wires. It used to be that there were pay phones everywhere. This was, in part, to make sure everyone had access to a phone when they needed one. In part is was a business decision, which is why they’re going away (because people have all sorts of access to phones now).

 

 

Social justice and the free rider problem are two things discussed in every class I took for my MPA. We have to make sure people (those who can’t afford) get full benefit of public investment at a fair price (whatever fair means), and make sure that if people (who can afford) can use something that they pay a fair price, both to support its continued operation and to make it available to those who can’t afford it. There are a few public water drinking fountains in the world, otherwise we even pay for water. We pay for water. I’m not aware of any breaks in water rates for low to moderate income people (note that renters don’t usually pay for water directly-but when landlords pay for water they have to cover the cost of it in the rents they charge).

 

 

In order for a public wireless network to function, a lot of people have to pay for it. Which is another way of saying that a lot of people have to use it, and be willing to pay. They’ll pay through taxes, or through user fees, or both. Volume of use is one distinction between monorail and critical infrastructure; perception of acceptable self-funding levels is another. It seems reasonable to look for a way to let low and moderate income people pay less than market rates for public wireless network use. Natural gas and electricity utilities do something like this. Roads, water, natural gas, and electricity are tied to public health matters such as congestion, filth, and warmth. Communications are related to public health and safety (which is, I presume, why GR wants to connect police cars to the proposed wireless network), but they’re not really on the same level as safe drinking water. I can see how high-speed communications can help the police mission on a case-by-case basis (the SWAT example in the link you provided, maybe downloadable search warrants, and pictures to confirm identities to name a few), but I’d expect that most of the time ordinary radio communications is sufficient to most police matters.

 

 

The essential argument in favor of municipal wireless networks is “to be a modern city, we need this.” On the one hand, that’s an argument like ”if all your friends were jumping off a bridge…”  On the other hand, it’s not exactly a bad argument, since it’s pretty much the same argument made for electricity about 100 years ago (and for gas lighting franchises, starting almost 200 years ago). There were hardly any uses for electricity 100 years ago, but now one doesn’t even think about cities without electric service. Again, communications technologies are different from electricity (and water, natural gas, and transportation), and here–finally–is where the difference lies, and where the rub is. I’d like to work this out more clearly, but communications technologies deliver something which is optional in a different way than the way electricity is optional. Communications content is a commodity, and so is electricity. But the commodity value of content is preferential, where the commodity value of electricity is assumed. I might choose Lifetime over Fox, or weather.com over the Drudge Report or not to watch TV or not use the internet, but there is only one kind of electricity (leaving aside the method of generation–which is a whole different conversation).  Furthermore, I would never think that lack of access to electricity was an option (except in limited circumstances like camping, or in thought experiments like this one). But electricity did used to be something people had to choose; just like now there are places (I expect that, even in the United States, some are within 15 miles of where you are right now) where people have the option to choose to connect to water or sewer lines.

 

 

It may be that within a generation the question of municipal wireless communications will be, like city-wide electricity supplies, a no-brainer. Right now it’s looking that way. The fact that right now we don’t know to what uses the network will be put doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. There weren’t very many uses for electricity 100 years ago, and there are a lot more now than there were even a generation ago.

 

 

Based on the links I read, GR seems to be taking something like a CATV model: let a firm use public utility poles (or water towers, or tall buildings or whatever) in trade for police access to the network, make anyone who wants to use it pay a market rate, but make sure low and moderate income people can access it at a reduced rate (or, like with pay phones, on a per-use rather than subscription rate). Incidentally, Philadelphia seems to be using a different model, an economic development model where an authority (like a DDA or a transit authority–like the Rapid) takes care of things. Again, this is similar to water and sewer enterprise funds, where the rates (or rates plus advertising) will have to carry the whole expense and run its own surplus. 

 

 

The heart of your questions, though, was how does community survive with so much mediation, and can municipal wireless networks (however they’re deployed–city department, public enterprise fund, semi-public authority, private firms using public assets through franchise agreements, or strictly private provision) help? Can a mediating technology more tightly knit a community together? (Let’s leave aside, for this discussion, the idea of on-line community, and focus on the human community placed in a local geography using a many-to-many communications network, since I feel that’s your focus in your e-mail.)

 

 

You asked about WalMarts, Amazons, YouTube, etc. A wireless municipal network won’t help local communities prevail against the tendency of corporations to standardize, since all such a network can be is communications pipes. This tendency, and concerns about it, go back at least as far as the founding of this country. These large corporations have their own communications networks, which a local environment can parallel (and potentially even connect to); but what the local environment cannot provide public access to are the analysis tools these corporations use (nor even equivalent tools–at least not directly through the local government, business groups can provide such things, generally on a membership basis like a Chamber of Commerce–and even then it’s still a bunch of individual small actors using the tool, rather than a large unified actor).

 

Local environments, even when agents cooperate, are Adam Smithian invisible hand environments. Corporations, when acting externally, are competitive agents in such a Smithian environment and are out to maximize profit; internally, though, they’re more like dictatorships with a hint of socialism thrown in to make sure employees are both contributing fully, and feel like they’re getting fair payment. Let’s consider an example we both know and love: Schuler.

 

With 5 stores, and a web site, Schuler is a corporation. If we split all the employees of Schuler into, say, 30 small bookstores and cafes, those 30 establishments couldn’t do what Schuler does economically. Could they be run profitably? Maybe. But they wouldn’t be coordinated. Would they be important in their neighborhoods? Probably. Schuler can do what it does because the owners direct the company, and the staff do what they tell them to. And because of the communications network they’re a part of, and which they piggyback on. Its unity on a large scale permits it to act in ways 30 different stores employing the same number of people, with the same number of square feet, carrying the same number of titles, the same number of copies, serving the same menu, and on and on could not act. Not even with sophisticated communications tools. They couldn’t aggregate the marginal resources to take advantage of (or create) the opportunities that a unified actor with the same aggregate resources can. They might be able to form a cooperative body, but that’s one more actor in the community, and not the same as a unified actor with the same total resources. Communities will rarely, and should not make it a mission to, be able to act in such a unified way.

 

 

I’m getting away from the essential question you asked about the wisdom of municipal wireless networks. But I think this stuff about the nature of municipal infrastructure, and the working of community might help with it all, and I’m getting us very close to my answers to your questions. A couple of underlying assumptions of free-market economics is that agents have equal access to information, and that they make rational decisions. Municipal wireless communications opens the world of information at least a little bit wider to everyone (everyone who has the hardware to connect, and the means to pay their fair share). This is good. There you go. A straight answer to one of your explicit questions.

 

 

Access to information is good for the grassroots activist and for the small business owner (who is often also a grassroots activist, but with a commercial agenda). Access to a two-way, fine-grained communications network is also good. People can use the network to have communications largely equivalent to conversations, meetings, rallies, news letters, TV, radio, etc. This is, in the abstract, good for a community. The challenge is to turn that communications opportunity into action–actually go out in your geography and do something. Shop locally, walk around the corner and see if the park is OK, and hang out there for a while to make sure. Don’t just get notice of Planning Commission meetings on your cell phone; write a short letter to the PC about a matter you’re concerned about, or even go to the meeting. This challenge is not one which can be addressed through systems development; since the challenge is to develop civic mindedness and citizen habits. This is a challenge each generation faces; such habits are acquired and maintained only if people (as individuals) believe they will benefit; the presence or absence of a particular communications network is secondary (at best) to a positive experience of the process or, better still, successes in having their view prevail.

 

 

Remember, for all the amazing things the internet does, communications networks have always been around. The American Revolution was fought in broadsides before the shooting started at Lexington and Concord. Edward R. Murrow used television to address McCarthyism. Conservatives used short mimeographed newsletters for decades. The tools of organizing aren’t what make the organizing work; it’s the message and the belief that organizing will get you somewhere.

 

 

There’s a crucial issue I’ve skirted around because I suspect you have more expertise with it than I have. The actual process of access–let’s assume the network is built and functioning, and that access is actually available at no direct cost to the user. The user still needs a device of some sort to access the network. Since the appeal of a wireless network is that it’s available everywhere, all the time, to everybody, this seems like it has to be a personal and portable device. Kiosks won’t cut it. Anyway, the current network deployment model offers kiosks in most public libraries–and they present the same difficulties any kiosk model will have: monitoring to prevent damage or theft and hours of operation (tied, in part, to the labor cost of monitoring) to name just two. If we’re going to supply kiosks, we might be better off beefing up the library system; many of these now offer wireless access in addition to the banks of computers, and ethernet jacks.  Libraries can offer WiFi, WiMAX or any other wireless standard as easily as any municipal system, and access can be controlled by requiring a library card to log into the system. Library cards are generally free to residents of the service district, paid for by property taxes in the service district, and there can even be access compacts between districts similar to interlibrary loan. It’s nice idea, but different than what we’ve been talking about. In order for a municipal system to work, people have to carry the access devices around with them.  (I’m not sure it’s the best compass that ever was, though. You don’t need a Compass Service Provider. )

 

 

There are two problems with these devices. They ain’t cheap, and once you own it you’re stuck with the capabilities is has, even though, as mentioned above, network capabilities will be changing. Even if the firmware can be upgraded, there are limits to how many upgrades will be possible. How long will WiMAX be around? It’s difficult to say, it seems to be about ready for deployment, five year ago it was–if anything–vaporware.

 

 

From a social justice point of view, how should a network be deployed if the underserved can’t, on a very practical level, access it without significant up-front cash outlays? How much does a handheld device cost which can pick up a WiFi signal and allow web browsing with enough on-board memory for some cut and paste? This seems a reasonable minimum for this sort of device: gmail currently gives you more than 6000 MB of e-mail storage, with a limit of several MB per attachment. This gets me the opportunity to use the communications potential of the network, maybe not fully, but a whole lot of it. If I get one, maybe it costs a couple of hundred dollars, I’m stuck with it, and it’s useless if WiFi is abandoned.

 

 

Same with WiMAX, or whatever amazing use of spectrum comes after that. An interesting analogy here may be with the telephone network. I’ve previously mentioned that pay phones served a function, but now they’re increasingly rare. People get cell phones, and if you don’t have the means or desire for a service contract, you can buy a cash-and-carry cell phone just about anywhere–gas stations, pharmacies, I know of a music store in Muskegon Heights. My wife has one. Here’s the analogy, in case you haven’t seen it coming: pay phones are like kiosks for the telephone network, they’re literally built like safes so they don’t really need monitoring. Cell phones are pretty high-tech deals, but are now a disposable item. There’s no reason a basic WiFi receiver with a basic OS, some flash memory, and a simple suite of software can’t hit the cash-and-carry disposable technology price point. I’m thinking $75, tops. I think the laptops for the third world project packs a ton more capability into a roughly $200 price point.

 

 

Maybe the WiFi device is out there, let me know. Same with WiMAX, once it’s available. So the social justice problem may be a simple chicken and egg problem: maybe the devices aren’t there at low cost because the network hasn’t been built yet. The cell phone network (and its manufacturing base) had to reach a certain level of maturity before the cash-and-carry disposable cell phone was available.

 

 

That’s from the end user’s point of view, though. And the device I’ve just described is probably vaporware. Back to the beginning of these thoughts, the network component vendors are there looking to make a profit, and the network provider (municipal, private, or somewhere in-between) needs an operating surplus to keep the network running and improving. If the question of who pays for the network installation and operation can be satisfactorily answered, then I think the rest of it will come together nicely.  Back to the library example above: it’s paid for by property owners within the service district. I expect most property owners don’t fully realize that they even pay library taxes, much less what they’re paying for. Here’s what’s likely to be the outcome: each community will have a huge struggle (political) to figure out what financial mechanism to use to pay for it, then it will run along virtually unnoticed for decades. If it’s a stable model, people will even stop noticing (like libraries); if it’s an unstable model then it’ll be in the news from time to time (like road commissions currently funded by a flat fee per gallon of gasoline). Even when it’s in the news, though, people won’t pay too much attention unless they’re directly inconvenienced.

 

 

But here’s the end of the discussion. I don’t think the system can be deployed at a no-cost to log-in price. It’s too expensive up front, and it requires constant maintenance (both hardware and people to keep the software going, plus some help desk support). There are almost no public services supplied at no-cost to the user at the time of use. Municipal swimming pools come to mind. Shuffleboard courts. Public drinking fountains and public toilets–but we don’t let people live at these places, so they aren’t substitutes for what people do pay for.  But the big ones, the ones that really make a city go, those cost. User fees like with water and sewer. Taxes like with roads. Building the system under public auspices is good; and the potential for helping really improve the community is there. It’s not a unique potential, though.

 

 

And it will only help improve a community—make it healthier and more interdependent—if people want to use it that way, and believe they can make a difference by using it to make a difference.

 

take care,

Shannon

So, what is a community, anyway?

OK, I’m not going to pretend I can answer this question definitively.  But there are three things I want to point out.

First: (and I’ve mentioned this before) There’s a geographic component.  If there’s not a shared geography in physical space then it’s not really a community.  It’s some sort of club or interest group.  It’s a network.  But it’s not really a community.

Second:  Communities are made up of individuals, networks, and networks of networks (in any community that’s not shrinking, networks of networks can be multi-layered, and will become more so over time, and the quantity of simple networks will increase over time).  Related to the first point, geography is necessary but not sufficient.

Third:  The nature of a community is that some portions of it will be invisible to other portions.  This is as is it should be.  Not every individual should be connected to every other individual or to every other network.  Firstly, because not everybody likes everybody else, and these conflicts can derail otherwise productive endeavors.  Secondly, sometimes people really don’t have enough in common to make a connection valued, even it it’s technologically possible.  Thirdly, just because the technology makes it possible, and even if there’s enough commonality, and even if, in fact, we would like each other yet still connections shouldn’t be mandatory–I shouldn’t be forced to be connected, and I almost never appreciate unsolicited opportunities to become connected.  That’s why we can opt out of junk mail, register with do-not-call lists, stop paying dues and subscriptions, and slam the door on Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Finally, and I know I promised three things–this is like a bonus track, except it’s possibly my main point–no single component of a community should be, should try to be, or should want to be a mirror of the whole community.  It will fail in the attempt.  There will always be components in a community which will be invisible.  There’s an underground economy in every community.  There’s an illicit economy in every community.  There are things which get done in a community anonymously for the good of the other, or for the satisfaction of the donor.  Some things which are good in a community cannot sustain themselves in the face of all the connections possible–either they might generate too many clients, or they might generate too much uncoordinated good will.  (The Red Cross, in times of natural disaster, has been known to ask people to stop sending things and just send money.  And even just sending money got the Red Cross into trouble after the Sept. 11 attacks.  A less dire example is a book group, or the dance group I used to be associated with… fully connected, either of these examples might grow beyond a manageable or fun size, and splinter or die, or harm the credibility of the group or the idea of such a group or the notional leaders of the original group or sap those leaders’ passion for the mission.)

What I’m about to say seems weird to me, but there it is.  An effort to mirror a community on-line, or to present a community on-line feels to me like an effort to control what the community is.  Let me refine this a bit…

Lists of links can be helpful… the idea of the Grand Rapids wiki is appealing…  but something about this forgr post gave me the wrong kind of chills.   And it’s a little more than the mission drift I alluded to in my comment to that post.  I has something to do with control… I can’t put my finger on it, and I don’t doubt I’m over-reacting…

Anyway… every community has its cranks and its idealists… (and what is a crank but a worried idealist?)

“…hardly available… despite significant community interest.”

Scott an interesting comment recently. He wrote:

“With the recent explosion in Eastown, I was interested to see how short term news has become online. Three days after the explosion, information was hardly available. There was no in depth coverage despite significant community interest. There was no hub to hold together the information. There was more grousing about traditional media than the sort of impactful coverage that could enlighten the community and quell rumors.

“I’m not saying that a tighter local communication will solve this, but it should provide a forum for such localized storytelling to reach an appropriate audience.

What would such a hub look like? Might is look like this? http://www.viget.org/1500-1502_Wealthy_Street_SE

From the site: Viget is a wiki for the City of Grand Rapids, MI started in March 2007 by Michael Greene, Paul Wittenbraker, and George Wietor. Trannie joined the team in August 2007. It is a collaborative project of Civic Studio and G-RAD.

Goal–It was formed with the idea of becoming a place to share the citizens of Grand Rapids’ collective knowledge about what IS a part of our fair city as well as to dream and theorize about what COULD BE.

Viget takes its name from the motto of the City of Grand Rapids, Motu Viget.

—-

Additionally, my google search of “explosion eastown” turned up a handful of photos, the Calvin College newspaper’s article, and a couple of MLive posts from a few days ago (more recent than Scott’s original observation). I didn’t read the MLive follow-up closely enough to determine quality. None of these things (except maybe the wiki) can be considered a hub, and there’s no telling how long any of the sites will persist.

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I think the Viget wiki is an interesting case. It’s been around for a year now. Who knows about it, what is it used for? How can the last year of the Viget project inform the forgr project?

“Welcome to the Future! We’re glad you made it!”*

So, someone wakes up one day a member of the digitally under-served population, and wants to join the served population. (Yikes! Bureaucraticisms abound!)

http://forgr.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/application-process-thoughts/

I think it looks great. And I think it looks kind of intimidating. Picture it: I don’t have much education, no insurance, job to job, my contact with officialdom is government assistance programs, some police, family court. On the whole, officialdom isn’t my favorite part of the world. I can’t escape the internet; every ad I see has a web address, lots of people I know have e-mail, even fancy cell phones. But I can’t afford access, a computer, and even if I could I don’t know how to make one go.

Someone without the means to access the internet wants access. The kiosks at the library aren’t enough; they’re tied to the library, they’re only accessible when the library is open, and there are restrictions on who, how long, and what material can be accessed on the kiosks.

Forgr offers something to help under-served individuals get online. Very cool. The project wants the individuals to join a community for the service. Fair trade. I’m still busy as all get-out, don’t have any particular reason to trust something which looks official… the project has to overcome my inertia and possible resistance… and if I’m really poor, don’t speak English well or at all, or have some other subcultural reason for fear and low trust, well heavens to Betsy… it may be a fair trade, but I’m going to be a tough sell.

This person gets connected to forgr, and at the end of the process has what, exactly? A computer (desktop? laptop?)? An account with an ISP? Software training (browsing? on-line shopping? web-based e-mail? Youtube? An office suite? Mapping software? How to use a database? Virus protection?)? Hardware training (plugging in a monitor and printer? how to swap a hard drive or video card? Network design?)?

Where does this person go to get connected to forgr? The Community Media Center? The Hispanic Center of Western Michigan? An independent forgr storefront somewhere in Eastown? On the West Side? Somewhere out on Grandville Ave? Breton and Hall?

There’s a vision of the individuals to the served by the forgr project. What is still unclear to me is what benefit the individual will obtain which will be enough of a motive for the individual to get connected to forgr. Even the most energetic outreach will only reach so far if what is on offer isn’t all that interesting.

*Firesign Theater

What would make a community smaller, better, more kind…

From the brains of forgr.

“What would make a community smaller, better, more kind to one another? Connectivity? Common ground? Communication? Equality? Opportunity?”

Effort and good will belong on the list, too.

I’m not sure smaller is an intrinsically good goal for community. It’s not bad, but it seems an unlikely event in a healthy community. Communities are networks, and they’re human systems. They want to grow. Or complexify. Deepen. More connections… want… Anyway, it’s what tend to they do.

Unless smaller means more interconnected.

When I lived in Grand Rapids, I started going to a folk dancing group. Regular participants were attorneys, teachers, office workers, auto mechanics, professional musicians, retired people, nurse practitioners, and people whose occupations I never learned in the six years I went before moving out of town. We saw weddings, births, job changes, and plenty of birthdays. The networks affected by this small community can be inferred from the list of professions. Additionally, the small community called the Grand River Folk Arts Society was affected, and the networks it is associated with were affected by the dance group. The hall where the dance group meets lends its stability to the group, and–symbiotically–the group lends its stability to the hall.

Even so with forgr… potentially. The thoughts on process: registration, ID, the training sessions lifted from PA, and the earning of access by a community process. All good. The forgr process becomes a node in the community supporting the geographic component of community and addressing the brake apart concerns inherent in the internet. The symbiotic relationship (from a community-building point of view) is more obvious than in the dance group/hall example, since community-building is an explicit goal of the forgr project. If forgr is successful with its clients, then the forgr project becomes more firmly embedded in the communty.

Which bring up a question I’ve been wondering about. Who is the forgr client?

Brake us apart.

Technology harmful? The internet harms community? Do these strings of words even make sense?

Sure. Sometimes, but not totally, and not inevitably. What the internet does is accelerate and multiply whatever it touches. Let’s wiggle our fingers in front of our faces, make wobbly sounds, and travel back in time to the mid-1980’s to early 1990’s.

Back in those days, we had cable TV and Rush Limbaugh, sure. And mail-order catalogues, too. Correspondence schools, and Harold Bloom. And the religious right, and “razor blades in apples.” And gays. And gun nuts. People did things together, and they were afraid of things for no good reason. We gathered, summoned by free ads in the back of local newspapers, photocopied fliers stuck on utility poles, and could read things we agreed with in magazines like National Review or In These Times.

Going back further, we had the national divisions of Watergate, Vietnam, labor struggles of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, a huge division called the Civil War, and other structural divisions taking the form of the Whiskey Rebellion, Shay’s Rebellion, disagreements between property owners and tradesmen, and not even the War for Independence was universally welcomed. The Salem witch trials were at least as much about the breakdown of community as about the illegality of magic. None of these things needed the internet to happen.

So it’s likely that the internet will be intimately associated with the further breakdown of community. More accurately, though, it’s likely that the internet will be intimately associated with additional breakdowns of community. Bu since what community really is is a profoundly intricate interconnecting network for networks–one with a geographic component, but which has never been merely bound by local geography–the internet is unlikely to destroy community in the way we have traditionally though of it.

Briefly, what the internet can be expected to do to community is increase the atomistic nature of modern American society. My examples of the 1980s and 1990s were chosen to point up this trend. We have a way of individualizing our perspective on the world here in America. Probably the last time we really had unified mass experience of the world was World War II. Since the earliest part of the post-War period, we’ve been endeavoring to individualize the world for our own benefit. This individualization was fitful in the early decades of the post-War period.

By the late 1960s, though we were getting pretty good at it. We could talk increasingly only with people with whom we agreed, and our idea of community became less bound to geography and more associated with the idea of the like-minded. This, as the examples from the pre-1980s paragraphs was intended to show, wasn’t new. There had always been a sense that the like-minded had at least as much in common with one another, no matter where they lived, as the people who lived near each other did regardless of station in life.

Back to the internet. Now narrow-casting, browser history-sensitive ad targeting, rss feeds, and who-knows-what all make the experience of the internet ever more an experience of looking in a very, very busy mirror. (In the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, there’s a circus exhibit. One of the elements is a row of holes in the wall. You stick you head in, and the interior lights up. At the far end is a mirror, and you see your face overlain with colored lights in the form of clown make-up. This has been there since at least 1978.)

The internet allows you to shop any time, day or night, from your couch. Telephone ordering has been available for as long as Sears has had phones, but the internet accelerates the trend of not going to a local store.

So, really, if the nature of the internet is to atomize communications, shopping, and what all… if it is to make the elements of community which are interest-based ever less geographically based… then, really, is it a good idea to make it even more pervasive, ever more available, and ever more ever more?

Sure.

Community has survived more serious challenges in the past. And the forgr project is fundamentally about linking community with this technology.

In closing, “brake” is a funny looking (and funny sounding) word.

Bring us together

I’m generally skeptical of claims that a community has been created. If there’s a community going on, people will enjoy the experience of it without having to fall back on the mere word ‘community.’ However, if a group of people say they’re in a community, then I suppose they are. Community is a slippery and scalable term. At root, I’ll say community is a group of people, a gathering over time.

It’s not much of a definition, and I’m sure there are professional community minders out in the world who have a more scholarly definition, and one susceptible of  quantitative research.  But, as I say, it’s a slippery term, and one which has a way of so fundamentally framing the discussion it’s used in that I’d rather not get too detailed.

What makes community?  Historically, there’s a geographic component.  Online experiences have been calling themselves communities for decades now.  Honestly, community is a pain in the neck.  It’s a term we’ve always used… you know, always… but in contemporary terms its a network of networks.

For instance, the Grand Rapids community has a geographic component–Grand Rapids, the surrounding townships and cities.  It has tendrils out to Holland, Ionia, Muskegon, and so on.  It has an official component–City Hall, the County, and State.  It has an institutional component–the hospital, the community foundation, the churches and so on.  It has an organizational component–private and semi-private clubs,  semi-public gatherings, reading groups.  It has a social component–families, friends, casual acquaintances, the people you work with, that hottie at the bar.

And more.

And all that stuff is interconnected.  That hottie at the bar is probably in your cousin’s reading group and may be an administrator in the medical records department of the hospital, and all that stuff.  The two of you may even be on the same e-mail list for organic food recipes.

The point isn’t to talk about Six Degrees of Separation.  The point is that over time new technologies always… always… add layers to what community means.

Same as with computers, the internet, cell phones, text messaging, wireless services… wireless access.  Every technology has the ability to bring us together in new ways.  And help keep us together.  I’ve recently moved a couple of hundred miles from my hometown, leaving behind most of my family.  My wife’s family is even more far-flung.  The big Christmas present this year was a webcam so we can all stay in touch.  Our son enjoys it, and every time we use it, I think of 2001 and bushbabies.  (Can jetpacks be all that far away?)

So, here’s the deal…  access to the new layer of networks of a community is a good thing, and has the potential to add new connections to the lives of people getting the access.  The problem is actually getting the access.  The project under development at forgr sounds like a terrific way of resolving the problem.

Feb 13, 2008: The final question

Over at the forgr blog, a passle of questions were listed out, all good, and all deserving an answer.

I’ll take a stab at the one which happened to be the final one on the list, and which happens to be at the heart of my conerns.  The question is, “will it bring us together or brake us apart?”

So for now, that’s what I’ll be thinking about and writing about.