[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       publib
Subject:    Creating the Televillage conference 11/15-16 (fwd)
From:       jpolly () nysernet ! ORG (Jean Armour Polly)
Date:       1994-11-23 21:09:01
Message-ID: Pine.3.89.9411232145.J8227-0100000 () nysernet ! org
[Download RAW message or body]

Sender: jpolly@nysernet.ORG (Jean Armour Polly)
Subject: Creating the Televillage conference 11/15-16


	Creating the Televillage
	Nov 15-16, 1994 Tampa, Florida
	Steve Cisler
	sac@apple.com
	
This report may be posted on educational, government, non-profit, and
hobby  BBSes, servers, gophers, and FTP sites but not on those of such
services as
America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, or in the CD-ROMs compiled
from material available on the Internet. Commercial publishers and ventures
such as the aforementioned should contact the author at sac@apple.com.
	
	The Kentucky Science and Technology Council(KSTC), with support
from South Central Bell Telephone, GTE Corp., AT&T, Herman Miller,
Inc, and the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development. sponsored
this conference for people interested in establishing or running
community teleservice  centers, also known as telecottages or
televillages. These started in Scandinavia in the mid-1980's and have
spread to more than 325 sites in a dozen countries. More than a third
are located in the United Kingdom, so it was appropriate for Alan
Denbigh, the executive director of the Telecottage Association of
Great Britain, to address the 130 attendees from thirty states and
four countries.
	
	The telecottages in Great Britain seem to be a combination of a
walk-in center where the public can use computer equipment (usually
for a fee), where training classes occur, where telecommuters
congregate, and where more advanced equipment such as
videoconferencing gear may be deployed. All have fax and phone. Some
of these centers run bulletin board systems, but only about a third
of those attending the association's annual meeting used electronic
mail.  CompuServe hosts the European Community Telework Forum for
staff involved in these centers. Denbigh can be reached at
100272.3137@compuserve.com or by phone at 0453 834874 in the UK. He
can also provide information on their magazine, Teleworker, a
bimonthly print publication.
	
	Tampa was threatened by Hurricane Gordon before and during the
conference, but there was no real disruption. GTE held a
pre-conference tour/workshop of their advanced services such as
telemedicine applications running on a 768 kbps circuit and video
conferencing for distance learning running on a 112 kbps circuit
(ISDN would work for this) between a school for children with special
problems and mainstream public schools into which some of the special
kids would be integrated. The  teachers seemed very enthusiastic
about the possibilities as their group and ours conversed, though we
were about 40 miles apart. Aside from seeing someone in the distant
group raising his hand to speak, no visual information critical to
the exchange of ideas was used, though sharing documents is possible.
 The medical peripherals that interface to the high end video
conferencing system were varied, costly, and impressive in what tasks
they could perform. Much of the projected costs are justified by
transportation savings, by keeping rural clinics and hospitals from
not closing  (because patients bypass ones with sub-standard care,
even if they have to drive to the next big town), and because some of
the medical personnel don't want to live or work in the rural areas.
	
	An interesting case was the use in prisons where most outsiders
don't want to step foot (though we are quite willing to spend lavish
amounts to build bigger facilities to solve our crime problems). The
cost of transporting a prisoner to a hospital includes all the extra
guards and costs of security, so it is easier to justify the savings
for remote diagnostic equipment.
	
	Finally, GTE showed us their vision video on what they call "the
World Class Network", where they, too, claim they have already built
the information superhighway. I noted that the 1993 video made no
mention of the Internet, and the spokeswoman thought it might have
been because the Internet was not around when the video was made!
More likely is the difficulty many telcos have in integrating the
Internet into their sales and marketing strategy. It's amorphous,
chaotic, not in their control, and yet it's growing, in demand, and
must be reckoned with.  From a show of hands at the conference, about
40 % of the attendees were using the Internet at least for mail.
	
	Kris Kimel (kkimel@ssi.edc.org) of the KSTC, led a number of the
sessions on the Kentucky experiences which have evolved as his
organization became more involved with listening to the local
participants than in focusing on what technology to drop into
Pikeville in Appalachia or into Elizabethtown, a medium-sized town
about an hour from Louisville. Neither are particularly rural, but
the project is designed to serve a cluster of rural counties near
each town. Kimel stressed the Televillage (a word I believe they have
trademarked) is more of a process than a thing. The director of the
Pikeville project tried to explain to the mayor that the Televillage
was what he and the others in town could create. At first this
angered the politician who wanted something tangible like a school or
plant or museum building. Later they came to realize that the
technology may come from the outside, and even some possible uses,
but the real creativity and organization comes from the local level.
	
	At the same time the process was discussed, architects and
manufacturers of office equipment have been designing what the new or
re-purposed building would look like once money has been found for
the center. Some conceive of have spaces rented by anchor tenants,
perhaps a business whose remote employees would use the facilities
several days a week, or perhaps a state or federal government agency.
Outside of Washington, the General Services Administration has set up
four telework centers to study the effect they will have on worker
productivity, decreased commuting traffic, and shifting office
culture at the headquarters. I asked if any of those designing the
centers actually used them or lived in rural areas.  The speaker,
Warren Master of the GSA, is a New Yorker and lives close to DC, but
he said that people using these centers joined the planning committee
and were making changes in existing and newly planned centers.
	
	In some circles there is a strong belief that a rural area will
never support a fancy, high end televillage and that starting with a
small electronic bulletin board is the only way to go. I asked the
panel that discussed applications what their opinion was. They each
had voiced a vision of broadband options, with eventual equity for
rural areas, and in answer to my question they thought it was better
to go full bore for the high end rather than set up something like a
BBS. The North Carolina Information Highway is the most advanced
state initiative that I know of. There will be 10 ATM (Asynchronous
Transfer Mode) switches in the state running at 155 mbps. There will
be 35 sites using it for distance learning, and access points will be
in K12 schools, colleges and universities, government offices,
courts, and health care sites.  Libraries will be the telecottage
public access points for the NCIS.
	
	However, the Elizabethtown, KY, group had just launched a multiline
BBS (running Galacticom's Major system with RIP graphics and Internet
electronic mail) which was demoed during the reception one evening.
Already, there were few free lines, and the most popular area was the
real time chat sessions. Most of the interchanges were fewer than one
line of text, but as the static information sources are filled in,
the system operators expect more use of those parts. The residents
are charged $5 a month to use the BBS, and it seems to be a tangible
accomplishment that can be used as they wait for the building and the
other services to be implemented. In fact, an area of the system
should be used to discuss and take comments on the planned
Televillage. The Pikeville televillage decided not to set up a BBS,
partly because a teenager in town was already running a very
successful one, and they did not want to compete with an existing
service.
	
	My own brief talk on Apple Library of Tomorrow community network
project support ended with an overhead showing the merging of
community networks and telecenters,even as broadband interactive
video services are offered. No single component is going to  serve a
city or rural area perfectly, but supporting a rich suite of services
will be more difficult in many rural areas. Obviously, I said that
libraries were important partners in these projects and should be
included in any televillage venture as well. There were librarians
from Kentucky, Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, and California at the
conference.
	
	Cathy Wasem (cwasem@hrsa.ssw.dhhs.gov) of the Federal Office of
Rural Health Policy  in Washington had worked for many years in South
Dakota (8 years on the Rosebud Sioux reservation), and she spoke of
the need for restoring the health of communities as well as
individuals.  The fact that 10% of the rural hospitals closed in the
1980's because patients went to ones in larger cities echoes other
trends of people shopping in larger centers where there is a Wal-Mart
or large mall, and of rural citizens commuting long distances because
the pay is better or because of the dearth of jobs near their
residence. Wasem distributed a wealth of printed information, much of
which is available from RICHS, the National Rural Health
Clearinghouse, housed in the National Agricultural Library near
Washington (800 633 7701).
	
	Dent Davis of the U. of Tennessee in Knoxville about the necessity
for increased collaboration, rather than competition, but he said it
required more energy and skills than some groups have.
	
	Gil Gordon, an expert on telecommuting, mentioned that only 4 out
of 50 Bell Atlantic top executives had used the Internet.  Gordon had
a button that said, "Turn it off, take a breath, get a life".  He was
the only person to overtly mention politics of technology. Indeed,
there was no mention of the phrase "electronic democracy," during the
presentations I attended. The emphasis was clearly on economic
development.
	
	The closing keynote by John Niles of Global Telematics
(70715.224@compuserve.com) was cautionary. He said the televillage
should not be sold as an anti-urban solution. The real power in the
country lies in the growing suburban developments that house so many
middle-class people and more and more major corporate offices that
have abandoned central cities and usually were never in rural areas.
He said we have to recognize the interdependence of all areas and the
connectedness between the rich and the poor. Niles hopes that the
lessons of the televillage can be applied to cities, and that links
will be established between city sites and rural ones. I would have
liked to hear more of his ideas.
	
	Both Kimel and Niles mentioned the rural inhabitants attachment
to what might be called traditional values, and Kimel said some in
rural areas of Kentucky were looking back to the 1940's and wished,
for example, that the EPA would relax regulations so that coal mining
would be a big job source again, or that people would change their
ideas about tobacco and that those farmers would improve their
business. Kimel is trying to get them to look forward.
	
	My own misgivings about basing rural economies on information
industries comes from the way that both capital and information are
more and more volatile. When South Carolina attracts BMW to build a
plant or Virginia persuades a distributor to build a mega-warehouse
for East Coast distribution, you know that they won't be leaving for
a while. But information industries, whether they are data entry
shops, software houses, financial processing divisions, or a
knowledge management center, can quickly pull up their tents and
strike out for another part of the country (or even another
continent) where capital is less regulated, where the populace has
the right skills, and where the network connection is adequate for
the anticipated traffic. The spread of the network gives more options
to investors, company strategists, and individual entrepreneurs, but
it makes it more competitive when economic development officers in a
town, region, or state seek to differentiate their area from others
trying to attract new business. Pikeville won't just be competing
with Elizabethtown; it eventually will be competing with Fargo and
Maui and Chiang Mai in Thailand. The "edges" that a rural site may
offer at this point is quality of life and a good training
infrastructure (which include good schools, of course).
	
	Public Agenda
	
	On  the evening of Nov 16, I flew to Tallahassee and dropped in
on the Public Agenda project sponsored by the Pew Foundation in
Philadelphia. Florida State University, the Tallahassee Democrat, and
a local TV station sponsored a variety of meetings where volunteers
participated in Moderating Public Discussion Programs and learned
techniques for facilitating group discussion to raise and discuss
problems in the local community. The meeting I attended was held in
the Florida House of Representatives chamber, and it was jammed, as
were the visitor galleries above the chamber. What impressed me was
the range of issues raised, the varied age and background of the
citizens who attended, and most of all, their ability to listen and
not interrupt.  The Tallahassee Free-Net was set up in the entrance
hall, and they plan to post transcripts or summaries on the Free-Net,
as well as encourage an ongoing asynchronous discussion.
	
	A reporter was interviewing the speakers, and he seemed surprised
when I told him I had only been in town for 45 minutes. He began
talking about the usefulness of an online database of citizens with
points of view so that reporters did not have to rely on the usual
suspects each time they did a story. We both thought the electronic
tools, such as online discussions and databases of citizen-experts
could augment but not replace the face-to-face meetings that Public
Agenda is emphasizing.  The Pew Foundation recently held a meeting to
discuss the so-called "new technologies" and how they might help grow
the democratic spirit in Americans.
	
	I toured the Leon County Public Library System which has had its
Internet connection delayed for local political reasons, but I was
impressed with the numerous training programs they offered to the
public several times a month.  The Free-Net hardware is located in
the library, as is the help desk. Adjacent to that small room is the
computer lab which will be beefed up once the direct Internet
connection is supplied. Given the range of equipment, Tallahassee
already has the makings of a televillage center in their own library.
This impressed me, as do the future plans of the Free-Net (which
won't be limited to providing VT100 access to the electronic city
metaphor of other urban Free-Nets.) I received but have not viewed a
new video on Tallahassee Free-Net and the Internet.
	
end-




[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]