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eye WEEKLY                                              August 8, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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EYENET                                                          EYENET

                       A MOMENTARY LOSS OF NIRV

                                  by
                            K.K . CAMPBELL 

Toronto's NirvCentre is dead. Long live the NirvCentre.

Yeah, Canada's only national, non-profit ISP has dissolved itself and 
sold off its "technical departments" to Open Text Corp.

With the hardware infrastructure parcelled out, it leaves nothing but 
NirvCentre's "Community Services" division -- a teeming den of wild-
eyed, web-spinning, lefty-fuelled fanatics.

They have re-christened themselves Web Networks. And Web Networks says 
it will continue that non-profit tradition NirvCentre established back 
in 1987 (the Jurassic era of the net).

"We sold the part of the organization that deals with all the tech 
development stuff, and all the machines, anything technical," says 
Mark Surman (msurmanweb.net), coordinator of user services at the now-
defunct NirvCentre.

Surman told eyeNET that NirvCentre's community board of directors 
assembled and basically concluded: "OK, Open Text has been after us 
for a while to buy our infrastructure and hardware. Let's sell it and 
we'll arrange that all the money we get from that sale, we'll put into 
the non-profit sectors."

The July sale/death of NirvCentre is part of the evolution of the net: 
the separation of content and connectivity, a divide continually 
deepened by the zooming capital costs of connectivity. It used to be a 
simpler world of individual entrepreneurship. Believe it or not, the 
original NirvCentre even sold PCs to its users.

Such innocent times are over as the corporate giants divvy up and 
fence in the digital commons.

Waterloo-based Open Text focuses on info management and networks. It 
has a long history of association with the non-profit org and 
continually absorbed NirvCentre employees over the years. (Hell, that 
infiltration has been so extensive, one has to wonder who took over 
whom.)

Because all the progressive content stuff sits on, and is networked 
through, the machines Open Text acquired, the Waterloo company has 
agreed to host Web Networks for free until the year 2000.

That was negotiated into the sale so as to not disrupt service, Surman 
says. "I mean, we do all kinds of weird shit, like UUCP mail transfers 
to Cuba," he says. Nirv/Web Networks is the main net link to the 
Yanqui-defiant little isle.

Web Networks is also entering into an alliance with iStar to gradually 
replace current dial-up equipment with iStar's national network. That 
will mean Web Networks will provide local access to more than 30 
Canadian cities.

"For 10 years, the non-profit services struggled along," Surman says. 
"It kept itself afloat, but gradually picked up debt. All of a sudden, 
we are free of that, and we are free of the hassles of running the 
equipment."

That's no small benefit of the sale, liberation from endlessly dicking 
around with UNIX. Fun though UNIX be, believe it or not, some geeks 
actually wake up one day and discover the thrill is gone. (It's in 
Bible, Book of Kings 23:23: "And in the seventh year of its 
dispensation, thy geeks shall weary of UNIX and seek shade under the 
trees of JuJu in the land of Thud.")

That is definitely part of the reason eye stayed so long on Interlog's 
system -- though we are still associated with Interlog boss Matt 
Harrop and his Band of Gypsies. It's a real pain in the arse to have 
to maintain a news server and whatnot.

"Exactly," Surman says. "And that's obvious to people setting up shop 
now. But because Nirv has been running its own hardware for 10 years, 
it was harder to extract ourselves from that."

Now it has.

(Of course, while NIRV is bailing out of tech hassles, eyeNET's 
business geniuses are getting into it, with the new eye.net server and 
Netizen pages -- http://www.eye.net/Netizen . To finance the operation 
last January, eyeNET business visionaries invested heavily in British 
beef futures.)

So, though the guts are gone, the heart of the non-profit operation 
remains. Web Networks will continue helping nonprofits get online with 
its Community Resource Centre -- http://community.web.net .

The Community Resource Centre lets users access over 1,200 progressive 
conferences and "social change resources" -- like EcoWeb, WomensWeb, 
UnionNet and Faith and Justice Network, the Social Development 
Network, plus organizations in human rights and social services. There 
are also fax and press release services.

Contact Toronto's stalwart progressive geeks via webinfoweb.net or 
596-0212. Web Networks offers two levels of service: If you have a net 
account, $5 a month (or $50/year) gets you access to their web site 
and content (the web site is the front door) -- that's a real gold 
mine of info for a fiver. And, if you don't have a net account, they 
sell access.

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