TELECOMMUNITY UPDATE
Meeting Notes:
South Coast Telecommunications Alliance (SCTA) Meeting
February 26, 1998; 7:00 p.m.
Santa Barbara County Planning Commission Hearing Room
Meeting Notes by Dev Vrat: imago@silcom.com30+Attendance:
Speakers:
Allen Parsons, Executive Editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press
Raul G. Gil, Special Projects Coordinator of the Santa Barbara News-Press
Dr. Steve Eskow, VP Strategic Sales, Durand Communications and President of Electronic University Network
Jim Neuman, Executive Director, Santa Barbara Economic Community Project (ECP)
WELCOME:
After everyone had an opportunity to secure refreshments, SCTA Coordinator, John Wiley, opened the meeting by thanking the SCTA sponsors: Connected Systems for sponsoring the meetings and refreshments, Silicon Beach Communications for connectivity, and the Water Store at 5342-B Hollister for pure drinking water and dispenser. The meeting opened with brief introductions. SCTA meeting participants may be identified from the "Participant list" on the SCTA Web Site (see URL below. If you would like to be included on this voluntary list or have your listing changed, please e-mail Dev Vrat: imago@silcom.com).
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
SCTA maintains a website providing information about the group <www.silcom.com/scta>. We also have three automated e-mail discussion groups (ListServers). Please see the SCTA Web site for more information on how to join.
There will be a meeting of the North County TeleNet group, Friday, March 20, 9:30 to 11:30 in Santa Maria. This meeting may be made available to SB participants via teleconference. Please contact Jeanne Sparks <urbanske@silcom.com> or watch the SCTA mailing list and Web site for details.
The Santa Barbara Industry Education Council (IEC) has been working to get computers into the homes of every fifth grade student. They accept donations of 486 or better, tune up and place in households. More information is available on their website.
Several SCTA participants collaborated in the Summer of 1995 to produce an event called "TeleCommunity" which was held at SBCC campus. The event brought together numerous sectors of our community to discuss a vision of an online local community. After an energizing opening plenary session we split off into breakout groups based on interests. The conference proceedings are available online at the TeleCommunity website: <http://telecommunity.santa-barbara.ca.us/>. There is now growing interest from a wide variety of individuals and groups, in renewing work on this concept.
First Speakers:
Allan Parsons and Raul Gil
Santa Barbara Coastline
<http://www.sbcoast.com>Coastline is not intended to be an online duplication of the Santa Barbara News-Press printed edition. Coastline is moving to provide interactivity, news and information, and creative ways to engage people. The goal is to provide elements of an online community: information about Santa Barbara, educational opportunities, directories; and to keep the information current. Coastline provides discussions about current community interests. There was an interesting community dialogue on bi-lingual education when City Schools took up that issue. There was also large community participation when Walter Capps died.
Coastline based on a "sound business economic model." Coastline was developed in Nov 96 primarily by Steve Ainsley, Jeff Menard, and Allen Parsons at the News-Press and Frank Dziuba, then at Silicon Beach. Coastline must at least break even and hopefully, make a profit. The News-Press is exploring, "How can we make money at it?"
Raul explained that, like most of us, two years ago, he didn’t know much about the Internet. He was intrigued by its interactive community potential. He is not a technical person. His role is information management. The word community involves a lot of people. Several groups are working toward an online community. Nick Tonkin is working to bring Spanish language people into computers, Adult Education received a large grant, there is pairing of students with computers. The link to all of these efforts is "community."
The News-Press gets vast amounts of information in a variety of formats, from different sources. There is a Zip+2 (company) program called "Builder." The information comes in and is sent to the program. The program "removes all newspaper mark-up," categorizes and indexes the text, and constructs the html pages. The Coastline web pages link back to the original text.
Now that we have the website going, we ask, what are we going to do with it? We explore what information is most requested and determine how to provide it. People from around the world are asking for Barney Brantingham's columns. We want to develop a "search" capability for a specific subject. We have been told our pages load too slow and we will be fixing that. We want to provide a bi-lingual forum. Predictably, everyone wants to be on the home page.
Being a business model, we ask, how can we get funding? We have had some successes such as classified ads. How can we transfer hits into advertising sales? People want to see results very quickly.
With regard to the print version, we notice that people tend to provide feedback in an angry fashion: "Why did you do that?" In the online Coastline version, this interaction takes a much different supportive tone: "Good try, but this is what we would like to see." The News-Press has no explanation for this difference but observes it.
There are over 2000 web pages out there in Coastline. We are putting the archives online and trying to develop a search feature. We would like to have chat rooms. We would like to see the community in a forum with John Lankford chatting on the web. Security is an issue. We are exploring what can we do as a newspaper to develop the online community?
Maintenance: It is a learning process shifting from a print production house to a web delivery system. For example, the graphic artists were providing images at huge file sizes. There is only a handful of people assigned to Coastline: Raul, small portions of systems and news staff, creative services to design ads.
Question: Why was the name Coastline selected? Why not News-Press online? The online world is new. The thought was that online version will be totally different than the printed News Press. Right now they are similar. In the future, the static news may become a less prominent feature of the Coastline site. Coastline would have a larger image than News-Press. We may have gone too far the other way initially, and are now reintroducing News-Press to the Coastline site.
Comment: A Santa Maria resident commented that the News-Press is not in Santa Maria and the Santa Maria Times does not cover County news. There is a vacuum of information in Santa Maria. He is able to view county news on the Coastline site. He socializes in San Luis Obispo County. There are "many" communities. He would like to pick and choose news.
Question: Why can’t you adopt technology of other online newspapers? Because the newspapers are scattered, all different, not compatible. Boston.com LA Times, are all experimenting, all trying to transform ourselves.
Question: What happened to the user generated discussion groups? It was a free for all. People were self-promoting. Coastline moved to topic of the day. Recently it has been storm watch.
Suggestion: Link to community websites? I would be willing to pay. This would be a major effort. Coastline development is not focussed right now. We are trying to determine a direction.
Question: Hit rates? 1500 users per day and ramping up steadily. Drops off on week-ends. Steady ramp-up.
Next Speaker:
Jim Neuman, Executive Director
Santa Barbara Economic Community Project
<http://www.sbecp.org>The Economic Community Project (ECP) was formed by a group of civic entrepreneurs during the recession in response to downsizing, and defense cutbacks. For example, Steve Ainsley of New-Press plays a prominent role. ECP conducted a series of forums throughout the community. The result of this community process was the goal of retaining and attracting higher paying jobs in the region. ECP is targeting three "clusters:" medical devices, telecommunications, and multimedia software. Sustainable environmental business has also been added. These "clean" higher paying sectors are sought to preserve the quality of life in the region. The quality of life of the area is being used as a key marketing feature of ECP in their website, video and marketing efforts.
ECP has a series of "Initiatives" (described on their website). Perhaps of interest to SCTA is the "Telecommunications" Initiative. This is being approached from two different angles. One is Infrastructure and bandwidth. The second is the "Smart Community" phase. In the 1st phase, ECP worked with Cox Cable to links schools and public entities. This was successful at the City level and they are now working at the County level. They are interested in joint ventures Cox Cable and Coastline. Concerning Phase II, "Smart Community" although ECP is primarily economically and business focussed, it recognizes that a Smart Community must provide inclusive access to all. Disenfranchisement is an issue. Perhaps kiosks will assist.
In addition to access, content is another major issue. The content is poured into a bowl and we must provide some sort of framework. Maybe its Coastline as it has been envisioned this evening. We are looking for an all-inclusive concept.
ECP is considering "Welfare to Work" as a pilot project for the Smart Communities concept. It is attractive because it touches all sectors of the community and money is available for this type of experiment.
It is hard to develop a Smart Community in a voluntary way. Somebody has to have responsibility for working on it. The next Smart Community meeting is planned for March13 at County Health Care Services at 1:30 p.m. Other sectors of the community are encouraged to attend. Dev Vrat offered to post the agenda on the SCTA web site.
Next Speaker:
Dr. Steve Eskow, VP Strategic Sales / President
Durand Communications / Electronic University Network
Durand: <www.durand.com> CommunityWare: <www.communityware.com> Electric Minds: <www.minds.com>
In the late 60s I was a college president in the smallest county in New York. We talked to local employers to see what courses they wanted. Electron Microscopy. The college made a large investment in expensive brochures. Result was only six students. We could not afford to put on the class for only six students. Slowly we learned that if we could recruit students from around the nation and around the world their presence in our courses would make it economically feasible for us to offer the curriculum: the non-local students made if possible for us to serve the local students. Our new online work extends that idea to the new possibilities of telecommunications: we can use the Internet and the Web to put students from Santa Barbara CC or USCB in an online classroom along with students from New England and New Delhi, actually adding an international dimension to distance learning--and at the same time bring into the local community dollars and yen and rupees and pesos. We are convinced there is a "Knowledge for Export" business opportunity possible for Santa Barbara and the SCTA: there is a national and international market for our knowledge now housed on our campuses, and for the rtechnical skills now housed in our SCTA members.
Andre Durand has been engaged in putting together partnerships acquisitions, and mergers to position our company as the nation's provider of online education and training, as well as "community building." He acquired Electric Minds, which was created by Howard Rheingold whose book "Virtual Communities" is the authority in the field, and the many conferences and discussions which make up Electric Minds are outstanding. Now he has acquired our firm, The Electronic University Network, which has a decade of experience in online education. And as we speak he is completing a merger agreement with Online Service Systems (OSS) of Denver, Colorado, a firm which provides sofware and hardware that enable telcos and cable companies to offer high bandwith Internet services.
The new frontier for colleges, schools, and other learning organizations is online learning. Distance learning allows the school or college or company to serve the remote learner far from campus, or the disabled, or the traveler, or the homebound: the single parent, the frail elderly, the soldier in the barracks, the traveler in his or her hotel room. And, of course, the workplace can become a campus, or a church basement.
A college is not a simply a collection of courses. Campuses consist of classrooms, library, student union, college community: a complete learning environment. Online courses that do not provide library service, counseling, or other student support are not giving equal service or educational quality to their remote students. We do not preach putting "courses online," rather putting the "entire campus online."
CommunityWare provides for interaction. There is a mistaken view that that instruction means, "Put instruction on truck and deliver on front lawn for student to pick up." Instruction involves providing a learning community, with dialogue and conversation. For example, Put forth the proposition: "All men are created equal." Did our forefather mean to include women and blacks? A true college would provide interaction among the students to discuss the many factors of this question. An online campus should also provide this dialogue. Online instruction should not consist of a high tech video of Charleston Heston signing a Declaration of Independence. CommuntiyWare provides all the tools to allow the online campus community. Asynchronous conferencing (ListServers), threaded discussion groups, templates for student home pages in one hour, chat rooms, Media center. Real Audio, Real video, etc. However, technology can be as excluding as admission standards. The more technology a system uses, the more excluding it becomes. By the time you get to full motion video, very few have it.
My mission is to work with Durand and Software, and merging OLS which is in business of moving telcos, cable to high bandwidth. Shortly we will invite you to join the Pangaea Network. I t is a common platform supporting education, training, business market, schools, colleges, universities around the world. It will provide a suite of services of the . basic college campus. For those of you who would like to see this work in progress: <http://www.durand.com/pangaea>
Colleges are excellent resellers: they sell books in the bookstore , concert and football tickets, a variety of goods and services. And when new technologies need to be introduced to the American public--the typewriter or the automobile_-our schools and colleges teach the skills and knowledge the public needs to operate these complex new tools. They will do this job for the computer, the Net, the Web--and for technologies that we of SCTA need to make them aware of.
Schools, colleges and universities, corporate training operations, and other learning businesses will be the principal clients and customers of The PangaeaNetwork.
The network will use open standards . Active Server Pages technology. It will include live services, instant messaging, chat, etc. We are talking about Microsoft IRC type delivery. However, the system can't be chat based. This doesn't work due to global aspect of Internet and time zone differences, etc. Will focus on asynchronous conferencing. Chat may be used optionally for personal discussion basis.
Question: Electric Minds has been highly successful. Why are some bulletin boards successful and some not? The answer is to have an expert such as Howard Rheingold in a Salon Style discussion. Pick a theme. Get a host skilled in keeping conference moving. From the salon, individual can create their own topics. For example: Host University. Conference Topic: "The Future of Technology." This is inviting and intriguing. Participants are encouraged to create sub-topics of their own. Host/Conference/Topics structure works well.
Question: Is there competition to Electric Minds? The biggest competition is the schools "in-house." The Info Services staffs are saying we can do it ourselves. Unfortunately it's not a technology issue. The campus is more than the technology.
There has been some confusion about CommunityWare. It is software but we also have server and web page service. Anyone can come on and create a community group in an hour or so.
Question: Santa Barbara has had many false starts. Why? No single answer. Some community groups don't attract because they are open to all. In some, the open ended and open access doesn't work. People come and leave quickly. For others, the very diversity is what is attractive. There is this tension between open access and the gated community. Need to define what audience are you trying to attract. Admission standards may be required for professional groups. There is a diversity of citizens. Online community may fail if purpose and market is not clearly identified. Another aspect is hitting a critical mass of online users. Getting a base of users to know each other. Get a host with a reputation. Determine who you want to attract. Get a respected host organization in that field to cosponsor. Groups will notify membership to bring online. For example, Intranets. Dr Jennifer Stone Gonzales has written books and has following. She is a skilled host. We used her credibility, intellectual power and name appeal.
Comment: The Santa Barbara BBS's were great. Now they are gone. There is so much fragmentation now.
Comment: Community sounds stuffy. I can't get into it. Give me something I can relate to. Old entertainment saying: "Give them what they want." Identify the market and there is no problem. For example, there is a large market for adult sites. They are not struggling with how to get community online
There is an interesting book called "The Wired Neighborhood." The real future is in revival/renewal of old style neighborhoods. Organize a neighborhood group and get them online. Kids can sell cookies, families can find a babysitter. Need to teach people how to take neighborhood online. The goal is to initially get 100 colleges online. Then the colleges will teach others in the community to also get online.
Question from Durand to Coastline: How can we best work together? Understand we can't take revenue away. Okay to work together if we don't take revenue? Durand has technology. Lacks social connections. News-Press has pulse of community. Lack technology.
Comment: Why doesn't the News-Press use the paper to invite a dialogue with the community on the Coastline website? "Come online and share with us." The News-Press should discuss what's going on in the website to engage the community -- not just advertise the URL. Other media (television stations and movies) effectively market their websites and use them to engage in a national community dialogue. The News-Press should similarly engage the local community in print and invite them to dialogue online.
Its not just providing expanded versions of print online. For instance, the entire News-Press Community Survey is available on Coastline. But it would be nice to also have discussion groups to have a dialogue about these important community issues.
Comment: North County and South County TeleCommunity: Appreciation expressed to Jeanne Sparks, Executive Assistant to Supervisor Tom Urbanske, for traveling from North County to attend the SCTA meeting. She requested SCTA to likewise participate in North County TeleNet Group. It would be nice to Video conference the two groups. Dev Vrat said he would investigate this possibility.
Comment from Dyrian Benz-Chartrand, Psy.D. <dyrian@server1.sbceo.k12.ca.us>: Instead of a host, the interest of the community could drive the ebb and flow of the community interaction and topics. I am drawing on my experience of leading and teaching therapy and training groups on this. Instead of focusing on a host/leader to carry the authority for the community a more current approach is a systems-based based approach. Here the whole system interacts, subgroups come in and out of being as the topics arise and individuals with similar topics are connected to each other and form subgroups. As the interests change, so do the subgroups. This provides a fluid, interest driven interaction that immediately responds to the ever-changing needs the entire system, which in this case are all active members of the community.
Jerry Estrada of the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District commented that MTD is installing kiosks in the community with information about the community for visitors. Once people are attracted by the information, they will be able to drill down to bus routes to get to various locations. It would be easy to eventually work with Silicon Beach to provide Internet access as well. MTD was one of the first community organizations to go online with all their bus route information: <http://sbmtd.gov/sbmtd/mtd.html>
Networking:
John Wiley thanked all the presenters for a very interesting and informative discussion. He invited everyone to continue in the formal networking portion of the meeting.
Next Meetings:
March 26, Nick Tonkin will tell us about the new Computers In Our Future (CIOF) project at SBCC Adult Ed, to bring more Santa Barbarans up to speed on computers and the net.
April 23, Dana Simmons will report on the latest research in Internet and Web trends.
For more information, contact John Wiley at 730-1027 <john@silcom.com> or Dev Vrat at 962-8999 or 568-2022 <imago@silcom.com> or visit the:
SCTA Web Site: <http://www.silcom.com/scta>
SCTA Mailing List Info: <http://www.silcom.com/scta/listservs.html>
SCTA Home Page: http://www.silcom.com/scta/
SCTA Minutes Index: http://www.silcom.com/scta/minutes.html