Introduction

When the Ottawa Freenet was first started, technical considerations were of great importance. There was no existing technology to build upon or upgrade : they needed to start from scratch. To facilitate the quick creation of the Freenet, a Board of Directors was created that made use of a very hands-on approach to the technology.

We now have a situation where this hands-on approach is failing the Freenet. We have some very highly technical decisions being made by people that do not need to know the technology to that detail. Decisions are slow in coming as each minor change to the technology on the Freenet goes through a large learning curve for that particular technology.

What the Freenet Board of Directors needs to do is try to abstract themselves from the particulars of any technology, and try to focus on the higher level applications of the Freenet. When someone presents the board with a new Technology to be approved, the board can then quickly determine if it fits within the application models that they would have set down.

If the Freenet Board continues to discuss the inner-workings and details of each particular technology, it will always be behind the services that can be offered by other organizations - other organizations that may not have the same community concern or founding spirit as the Freenet.

The board also does not need to be continuously encouraging technical people to become part of the board in order to ensure appropriate technical decisions. The resources that these individuals represent can be much more useful to the organization dealing with the details of the technology, leaving more appropriate community leaders to discuss the higher level application that the Freenet can offer to the community.

Technology Independent Community Communications Applications

I do hope that this list will be beneficial, and will open up discussions towards building a more sustainable future for Ottawa Community Networking.

• Identification. Anyone who has a drivers license, or one of the new Ontario health cards knows how useful these can be. Many different organizations make use of this identification as a means of checking the authenticity of a specific person.

  This service is an important part of a community network, since for each service we need to determine if identification need be required to use a particular service.

• Live person to person messaging. This would be a type of conversation that two individuals can have live. We are familiar with this type of interaction when we speak to people on the telephone or in person.

• Group live messaging This is like the live personal messaging, but involves more than just two individuals. Gathering in a room with a number of people for a meeting, setting up a conference call on the telephone, or other similar interaction would be included.

• Queued personal messaging We have all made use of this type of a service with voice-mail services, Snail Mail

• Queued group messaging This is similar to the idea of being able to post messages on a bulletin board. Many people can read these messages, and they read them at different times than when you send them.

• Person Search/Group Search/Indexes. When we want to find a person or organization's telephone number, we look it up in the phone book. If we want to go to a restaurant, we might pick up an Ottawa restaurant guide. There are many ways where this can be useful.

• Publications. We need the ability to have publications such as we currently have with print media, electronic media (Television, Radio). A community network should enable individuals and organizations to both be able to read publications by various organizations, but also have the ability to write and publish their own material.