South Coast Telecommunications Alliance: Second Meeting June 20, 1994 7 pm Antioch University, Santa Barbara The meeting was kicked off with a presentation to Frank Dziuba for the Silicon Beach office: a small beach! After calling the meeting to order, so to speak, John Wiley, the current chairperson, turned the chair over to Anne Cameron. We had a round of introductions: Bernice Deen teaches at Adult Ed and works for Whole Micro Training, who installs networks at SBCC. Nancy Oster introduced herself and Dave from MCC. Dave Oster formed Multiaccess Computing Corporation (MCC) to provide hardware for long-haul communications. Nancy does marketing for MCC. Nancy and Dave were both in attendance. George Thompson is from GRC. His group at GRC does Communications Network modeling. They're interested in doing that work in the commercial sector. Spoke about SB First, an organization just getting underway to promote local awareness of what high-tech companies are in the area and what they do, so that there can be more cooperation among these local companies. UCSB, and other companies are participating. Michael Marzzola from Cooperative Extension (not UCSB Extension) has been networked for eighty years or so. Has a great sense of humor! Runs 4H program, interested in using networking to enhance collaboration. Has countywide responsibility for setting up a network. Steven Stone, social worker, employed by Cottage Hospital, is interested in health applications. Frank Dziuba, from Silicon Beach Communications, briefly discussed Silicon Beach Communications. They are setting up to become a local Internet provider, and have a lot of excellent ideas for achieving various types of community involvement. John Wiley is keenly interested in the conceptual issues of getting people talking. Wants to get networking going in the community. Anne Cameron is "here with John." She's a new user of all this technology stuff. Dale Taylor spoke briefly about his interest in creating an event that would serve, hopefully, as a kernel for local synergy around the subject of community networking and information infrastructure. His focus is on the economic, business, and government oriented possibilities of telecommunications technology. Sharon Clausen described her vision of community networking. Sharon is stongly interested in community-related issues of telecommunications, specifically as it can help handicapped and underprivileged people. She's excited about the possibilities for collaboration among various local groups to seek out and obtain grant funding to implement various projects involving telecommunications and social services. Bob Kroes is a faculty member at Antioch. He seems to just be interested in what's going on with the alliance. Dave Oster talked a bit about high speed networking and the opportunity to get out there and help if we can. Caleb Clausen is interested in the technical aspects of networking, and thinks that putting games on line is a good way to generate interest. But they have to be challenging and fun. A woman came in from Lompoc whose name I did not get. John described the San Diego community networking environment. Started with PeopleNet (P-Net), a BBS there. Not used for social services; turned out they went commercial instead. Silicon Beach will attempt to do both: provide community services and sell accounts. There was a short review of our meeting from last time. Discussion about people don't know what to ask for and the point that that's exactly the reason to stage some educational event: to educate people about what's possible! There was a bit more discussion about the purpose of SCTA. Dale thought it was just to create an event where people would become more aware of the options; John thinks the purpose is much larger: to educate, discuss, take action, and make community networking and telecommuting happen in the Santa Barbara area. Anne wrote the following list on the board: Promote Community networking "Big ideas" eg NTIA grants Economic development plan Viable for social services, education, etc Infrastructure There then followed a general discussion that seemed to focus in three areas: networking and education, the purpose of SCTA, and the nature of and purpose of the event we're planning. The general consensus is that most people have no idea of the capabilities of telecommunications, much less the ability to access it. There needs to be much more education about these things available in the community. There is no obvious place where this could happen; however, Santa Barbara High seems to be fairly current with their networking capabilities. The education needs to be more than how to get on the network; it needs to be about how to get around the Internet as well. Another approach is to let people know what's available, and when they have a need to access it, they will educate themselves about how to do that. And the more creative we can be about getting this information out, the better success we'll have! We then discussed the purpose and mission of SCTA. Dale volunteered to begin the process of defining a mission statement for the group. The event was discussed, and we debated whether it would be one event or a series of events. We left it that first we would attempt to have the first one, then see what was appropriate after that. John thought we could quickly get a couple of speakers, one from the US Government, who is promoting this National Information Infrastructure. We agreed that whoever the speaker was, he or she be able to communicate to the general public in plain English (as opposed to techno-speak). We reminded ourselves that the event was really just a way to get publicity and awareness of the world of telecommunications. It was mentioned that it is felt to be important to get local "movers and shakers" of the business, education, and government involved in this movement so that it can truly have a life and funding of its own. John suggested that we form a few subcommittees to address certain specific areas of interest. To that end, three subcommittees were formed: Technical subcommittee, with Caleb as its head, and Dave and Frank as members. Event subcommittee, headed by Dale, with Nancy Oster a member. Informing the community subcommittee is headed by Sharon, with Steve as a member. We agreed to work on the mission statement in order to further pursue speaker possibilities As Soon As Possible. We adjourned, after setting a tentative next meeting date of Monday July 11. (This date has subsequently been changed to Wednesday, July 6, 7PM, at Antioch, at the corner of Garden and De la Vina)