A PGO

UNDER ATTACK

| like the governments | have worked for. | believe in them. | have worked as a mail carrier, coast guard patrol officer, and
Peace Corps teacher for the federal government, and | worked for many years as a librarian in a county government in
California. | know many dedicated people who work long hours at relatively low pay in government jobs. Government agen-
cies can be useful and efficient and entrepreneurial, but they can be a big drain on the citizens who support or tolerate
their activities or their inaction. Some really represent the needs and desires of the governed. Now that | no longer work
for any one kind of organization, life as a government employee seems somewhat alien. Friends who are retiring have 30
or 40 years left to live; security badges, rules and holidays that apply to no other kind of worker-- It seems so distant now.

What seem more grounded, more resiliant and adaptive are the organizations that set out to understand a situation such
as an environmental problem, a new technology, a need to connect and share, They start as a group of people and may be-
come more formal, more hierarchical, and much more organized than even the leaders had ever anticipated. They may use
telecommunications that are advanced, or they may use mail and telephone because they worry about surveillance or
about the structural overhead of LANs, servers, and web sites. Some are little more than temporary teams to work toward
a goal and then dissolve and re-group or burn brightly in the electron sky and then flame out (the Technorealists in 1998,
for instance).

The ones that I have been involved with are local groups, trying to make sense and take advantage of the new technolo-
gies seeping (or rushing) into their homes and offices, and schools. | helped form the Association For Community
Networking <www.afcn.net> here in the United States. So much of our energy had to go into filing for tax status and other
kinds of formal business, that some activists lost patience and pulled away. They wanted projects not procedures. We are
‘Not in the clear yet, but we are planning events and provide services to our members.

We are non-profit, for the most part, yet many community networks are taking on the role locally for what might be provid-
ed by the PTT, a company, or perhaps a local government in other service areas. In the late 1980's and early 1990's the
strongest model was the community network as a server and modem pool for people who wanted to get online at no charge
and later, reach the Internet. That has continued, and many of the U.S. and Canadian systems serve a good portion of the
people in a community, but of course the explosion of small and large ISPs has made this role less important.

The most significant development is that a non-profit community network by selling access and then using the funds to
help provide access to people without money, computers or modems has attracted the attention of the Internal Revenue
Service--America's tax collectors. In a recent ruling the network in question, Oregon Public Networking, has to split into a
for-profit SP and a non-profit, thus making it more difficult to raise money for equitable public access projects. Here is a
case where a PGO (though it would not know to even call itself that) is neutralized, or crippled, by a GO (the Internal
Revenue Service) for helping to advance some of the stated goals of our own President and Vice-President.

RUMOR MONGER

Are you tired of relying on many sources for rumors? Wouldn't you like a single portal through which all rumors, fresh and
vibrating and unreliable, could flow, and in the spirit of symmetric access, wouldn't you like to be able to add your own?
Well, it's not just possible, it has happened and it could be a model for the whole world. What works for a hundred geeks
and a few hundred marketroids could satisfy.the whole coalition of media tacticians.

a J i