Campus/Community Networking Partnerships The Coalition for Networked Information's Fall Task Force Meeting was held on October 30-31, 1995 in Portland, Oregon. The theme of the meeting was Campus/Community Networking Partnerships. In his introduction to the meeting, Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, stated that the pendulum had swung away from campus-based networking strategies to commercial sector strategies. Now, the pendulum is ready to move back to campus-community based strategies, and the meeting focused on these partnerships as an effective middle ground between purely campus-based versus purely commercial networking and networked information strategies. Campus/Community Networking Partnership: Boulder Community Network Ken Klingenstein, Director of Computing and Network Services, University of Colorado, Boulder, presented his views in a plenary session on developing networked information resources and services in a community context. Klingenstein is co-principal investigator on both the Boulder Valley School District Project, a national testbed for the deployment and utilization of K-12 networking and the Boulder Community Network, an effort intended to provide a sustainable model for community networking. Klingenstein has also played an active role at the federal level, serving as a member and chair of the Federal Networking Council Advisory Committee (FNCAC) and as a member of the board of the Federation of American Research Networks (FARNET). He is also currently serving as a member of the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Networked Information. Klingenstein provided a cogent and thoughtful overview of the issues involved in providing a community information network and also articulated many of the values that he feels are important for the community network to embody and preserve. He feels that the seminal role of community networks is to act as beacons in the Internet ocean by creating some structure for users. Klingenstein described the goals of the Boulder Community Network (BCN): * to build a distributed information service for the community; * to provide target community groups with network training and access; * to create an online community discussion forum; and * to assess the impacts of technology on the community. Scaling Issues His talk, Scaling Issues in Networked Information, described the issues that BCN has grappled with, many of which are the same as those faced in university environments. Scalable approaches to access are a key issue for the community network, and BCN has found that they need more than one access option to serve the wide variety of users and institutions, e.g. senior citizen centers, households, and schools. Managing the diversity of access mechanisms is difficult and creates user support costs. A high percentage (60%) of households in their area use networks, but BCN still needs to address public access issues, and they are looking at building Web kiosks for public access. Klingenstein reviewed the complex issues related to providing information in the community network context. Working with agencies and businesses with a wide range of expertise and ensuring that the information is up-to-date and from an authoritative source are key challenges. He noted that if the people who are providing the information are also using it themselves on the network, they will be more motivated to provide it quickly and accurately. BCN has needed to assume a role in integrating the information provided by the many community agencies in the area. BCN is also assisting with the development of state information resources and is responsible for the State of Colorado homepage. He noted that to make all this work has required a lot of distributed authority. Organizing information provided by agencies in a variety of formats is also a difficult task. The need to structure data for integration is critical. The data needs to be provided in a form that will permit its use and display for a variety of purposes. Among the issues that should be considered in the design of information for community networks are: the judicious use of graphics, ensuring that the information is designed for the screen, and designing for the trailing edge so that users do not need to have the most sophisticated equipment or network access in order to use the information resource. Klingenstein said that he feels that the greatest overall needs are for the development of a distributed information services environment, the need for automated processing of information, the need for post-processing, and the need for a protocol that is open, extensible, and public. In his discussion of navigation issues, Klingenstein noted that his experience showed that people want three types of integration -- geographic, topical, and chronological. There is also a need for the localization of information in the global Internet environment. He feels that it is particularly important for organizers of community networks to manage the top three levels of the information space, e.g. the top three menus, since that is where most of the integration of information takes place. Other navigation issues he identified were the need for common search engines and the question of what "home" means for the community World Wide Web user. Many policy issues need to be addressed in the organization of community networks, including individual expression in the public forums of the network and disclaimers for the information on the network. Klingenstein described organizational models to consider in the long-term as community networks mature. They include profit options, such as cable and newspaper; public sector choices, including government and commerce; and, non-profit sector structures with the support of grants. He described what he referred to as the "hidden agenda" of the BCN project. One of his key interests is in tying the community network to the schools, and he and his team are developing a curriculum which involves local data and issues, for example, a module on working with a GIS system coupled with a discussion of zoning issues. In addition, they are involved in a reengineering of social processes in the community by providing new ways of access to information. By providing the local United Way Red Book over the network, they are providing a view and access to the local social service agencies that is different from what existed in the print environment. They are also building a physical community, which involves creating a number of cross-community teams, supporting the shared necessities, and displaying the diversity of the community in the information commons. School Networking Project Klingenstein also described the goals of the Boulder Valley School District Project in which he is attempting to: * build a scalable model for deployment of networking in K-12, including technology and teacher training; * develop a curriculum which utilizes the particular characteristics of networking to reform education; and * assess the impact of the technology in education. He noted that while the community is deeply divided about many educational issues, they have found that a common ground is the community's interest in technology in education. Significant resources have been invested in teacher training, but they have found that while teachers can learn to use the network, the real reform of education is difficult to achieve. Schools need to go beyond pedestrian uses of networking to achieve educational reform and the full benefits of the technology. Klingenstein's projects have received support from the University of Colorado, the National Science Foundation, the TIIAP program of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Boulder community. He characterized the grants as catalytic to the projects, not as major sources of funding. Keeping the Human Perspective in the Network Klingenstein closed his presentation by encouraging the members of the audience to assist their communities in balancing local, global, and personal citizenry in the network environment and to ensure that the traditional guideposts of humanity are maintained since the network is ultimately such a powerful toolQwe must have a human perspective and we must nurture it. Additional information on this presentation, other plenary sessions, project briefings, and synergy sessions held at the Fall Task Force Meeting is available on the Coalition's Internet server: . The Coalition's Spring Task Force Meeting will be held in Washington, DC on March 25-26, 1996. -- Joan Lippincott, Assistant Executive Director Project Briefings A number of the project briefings at the Fall Task Force Meeting reflected the meeting theme of campus/community networking partnerships and also included partnerships between state and public libraries and their communities. These included: Community Networks and a Model for Technology Transformation, by Vicki Suter and Joan Gargano, University of California, Davis Utah Library Network Project: Lessons from the Trenches, by Amy Owen, Utah State Library Maryland SAILOR Project, by Barbara Smith, Maryland State Department of Education Academic Outreach at the University of Michigan, by Douglas Van Houweling, University of Michigan Education versus Technology: the Evolution of the Blacksburg Electronic Village, by Andrew Cohill, Virginia Polytechnic and State University Public Libraries and Public Access to the Internet, by Dan Iddings, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; and Lane Education Network, by J.Q. Johnson and Joanne Hugi, University of Oregon. Information on many of these projects and links to their homepages are available on the CNI server. ------- ARL 183 A Bimonthly Newsletter of Research Library Issues and Actions Association of Research Libraries December 1995