🚀 go-pugleaf

I've had some interaction with Austin Free-Net and Sue Beckwith, so I
think I can clear up some misunderstandings about the whole thing.

Sue's salary is the only money that the City of Austin is dedicating to
the Austin Free-Net. She has been detailed to help create a nonprofit that
is meant to serve under-served people and communities in Austin, and to
create public access terminals to the Internet in libraries and other
public facilities. (By the way, Sue is not a librarian -- she's a systems
developer who has previously worked in the environmental office of the
City.)

It is the assumption of Austin Free-Net that it will depend on volunteers
and donated equipment, as well as contributions amd grants, to get its
program up and running. Sue, Lodis Rhodes of the LBJ School at UT, and I
collaborated last spring on writing a large grant proposal that was
submitted to the Telecommunications Information Infrastructure Assistance
Program, of the federal Department of Commerce. Our grant proposal asked
for money to support equipment purchases and modest staff compensation,
but reliance on volunteers was built into the proposal too. We're waiting
to hear about this grant; the announcements are scheduled for late
October, but may be delayed because of some initiatives in Congress to cut
the funding for this program.

In the meantime, Sue has been working with staff of the Family Learning
Centers of the Austin Housing Authority to get them using the Internet and
the World-Wide Web. Residents of Austin public housing have been taking
classes on the Web at Go Media, an Austin graphics and P.R. firm (which
did the City's Web page) where Austin Free-Net has donated office space. 

David's description of Free-Net's intentions was correct -- this is meant
to serve people who would otherwise not use the Internet, primarily
because they can't afford to buy a computer. It is an attempt to build
some computer presence in low-income neighborhoods in Austin, similar to
what other communities are doing -- there are Free-Nets in about 75 cities
and rural areas in the U.S. (see the list at the URL:
http://www.nptn.org:80/about.fn/By_State.txt.html) and an increasing
number of cities have "community computing centers." In fact, when I moved
to Austin last year, I was somewhat surprised that Austin didn't have
something similar; fortunately, Austin Free-Net is trying to do something
about this (as is MAIN, although MAIN is more content-oriented than
access-oriented, so far). I'd say that the City's modest investment --
which really only amounts to redirecting Sue Beckwith's time for a year --
is laudable.

I also agree with Mike Byrnes that there is some potential friction
between Austin Free-Net and the independent ISPs in Austin. I've tried to
raise this issue at a series of meetings on public access issues in Austin
-- meetings attended by Gene Crick and organized by Sue -- but so far we
haven't gotten very far in addressing this problem -- or, for now,
potential problem. 

I'm trying to organize a series of workshops at the LBJ School on policy
issues related to public access to the Internet and to sources of public
information, and one of the sessions I'm proposing is a discussion of the
boundary between public systems and private systems. I don't think this is
clearly understood, even by the national advocates of Free-Nets. Ideally,
we should have some kind of task force investigating this issue for the
City, for the public. We want to support the start-ups in the independent
ISP business; on the other hand, we need to deal with the "market
failures" of people who won't be regular net users because they can't
afford it. This is related to the concept of "universal service" that the
telephone companies have been obligated to observe, because of regulation,
and which is now under attack. The policy question, and it's an important
one, is how to foster both market-based telecom services without
abandoning "universal service." No one, at this point, has offered a
last-word solution to this. 

-- Gary

Gary Chapman
Coordinator
The 21st Century Project
LBJ School of Public Affairs
Drawer Y, University Station
University of Texas
Austin, TX  78713
(512) 471-8326
(512) 471-1835 (fax)
Electronic mail: gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu