Issues in the Development of Community Cooperative Networks

Networking will enable citizens and their local businesses to create and pursue entrepreneurial opportunities through global niche markets. The Internet will accelerate the evolution of an electronically-connected global economy … Global niche markets will become accessible even to individual entrepreneurs. Small manufacturers will have the option to contract with other manufacturers and to co-market products with unprecedented flexibility. The emerging telepreneurial potential is limitless.

Issues in the Development of Community Cooperative Networks

The industrial age blossomed through diverse innovations of tens of thousands of garage tinkerers. Here, at the emergence of the information age, the need exists, nationally, for a similar renaissance of widespread inventiveness, spurred by personal global communications systems, home PC’s and communicating notebook computers, and local networks, beginning with the most affordable. Federal funding for grassroots innovation is necessary to reach our national goal of an NII based on practical applications: “Value-pull, not Tech-push.”

Public Access Issues: An Introduction

The question of what has promoted the cooperative nature of the Internet is an important one for planners and policy-makers. Even beyond the issue of maintaining this cultural component of the Internet, there may be a potential model for community development or organizational design … Some factors that have contributed to the culture of the Internet will surely change; an example will probably be the pricing structure. One characteristic that will help maintain the village-like character of the Internet after it has expanded far beyond its original close-knit membership is the ability to define and redefine virtual places and entities … Planners must pay careful attention to maintaining the many positive elements of Internet culture.

Public Access Issues: An Introduction

Growth in the number of users and in accessible information have fueled one another through a combination of demand pull and supply push, exemplifying the unusual economics of networks, where an increase in users increases rather than decreases the value of the service to connected users and institutions. This growth has challenged the culture of the Internet and drawn attention to the social aspects of participation in networked communities … Lee Sproull and Samer Faraj … identify the network as a social technology and recognize users as social beings. These distinctions will be important ones as planners seek to design systems more broadly integrated into our daily lives.

Public Access Issues: An Introduction

Development of the NII will go far beyond mere extension of the current Internet; it will be a product of both new technologies and resources and a newly defined Internet.

Public Access Issues: An Introduction

Disparate ethnic, economic, political, and other interests groups will find increased opportunity to organize and consolidate in the pursuit of their common interests. Similarly, these enabling qualities can bring increased vitality to a market-based economy. While economists differ on the appropriate policy tools and ability of government to influence markets, there is a common agreement on the set of conditions in which markets perform best. these conditions include perfect information and low (or ideally no) transaction costs, conditions best facilitated through information infrastructure. Access to market information allows easy aggregation of demand, which speeds the development of new products and markets. This has both near-term benefits of economic growth and job creation and the longer term competitiveness benefits that result from giving early adopters first-mover advantages in emerging markets.

Meeting the Challenges of Business and End-User Communities on the Internet: What They Want, What they Need, What They’re Doing

Every month, something newer and weirder happens, and the Internet seems to be substantially different every three months … Many worry that “big business” – providers or users – will destroy the Internet. I’m not worried; I believe there’s always room for research, educational, hobbyist and hacker communities. And, frankly the essential technology is readily available to anyone who wants to buy it, as the growth of shoestring providers demonstrates; if the Internet no longer provides an adequate home, I would expect that a core of network users could and would create Internet II within 48 hours. Indeed, that’s what a lot of what we have today is; a virtual network within the Internet, owned and operated by the Internet community. Much of what businesses are doing today leverages these efforts, making the Internet in some ways a trickle-up enterprise.

Meeting the Challenges of Business and End-User Communities on the Internet: What They Want, What they Need, What They’re Doing

New users represent revenue to fatten the access and backbone transport infrastructure, fund the information infrastructure and whois++ and other directory services, and provide more Archie and Veronica servers and mirror archive sites. They represent a market that can support development of commercial Internet user software … They represent a marketplace for value-added information services, which also means more money going back into the infrastructure. They help make more of the Internet self-funding without relying on revenue from the government, research or education users. Business and unaffiliated users also bring validation … And they bring a sense of perspective. The needs and desires of businesses and individuals are often different from those of the academic, research and government communities – but the filling of these new needs will benefit the original communities, whose own new users will want ease of use and comprehensive suites of services.