Conference report:
Global Village Third International Symposium

Feb 12-15, 1997, Vienna, Austria
http://www.give.at/give/gv97/symposium/index.html

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Submitted by Steve Cisler, Network Outreach, Apple Computer

I land in Zurich, Switzerland, on a cold winter morning, rain worming its way across the plane windows, police with machine guns walking in pairs across the black rubber floor. For some reason the Zurich airport signs were all in Helvetica type. In clearing customs at the airport, the guards carefully inspected my books with serif fonts but let me through. They tail me to the departure gate to ensure I don't try and distribute alien typography before leaving.

On the plane to Vienna I had the best croissant I can remember eating. The flight is as long as from San Jose to Los Angeles but three times as expensive. Austrian customs was most casual: a brief glance at my picture and then she tossed it back to me. I took a shuttle, subway, and bus to reach the Karolinenhof Hotel on the outskirts of the city, and I met Franz Nahrada, the Austrian who organized the conference. Nahrada's organization is called G.I.V.E. -- Globally Integrated Village Environment, and he has raised support from the city of Vienna, Institute for Building Theory and Design, and Future Base with funding from several federal agencies.

In the lobby I met Kim Veltman, a Canadian working on a new interface to the Internet. He was associated with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the U. of Toronto. Then Franz' parents, who own the hotel, stopped by to talk, and the languages shifted between French, Italian, German, and English. There was not a single common language for the whole group, and it was a rapid immersion into a common challenge: basic communication sitting around a table. And I was trying to fight off jet lag since I had only slept a couple of hours.

We drove to the Rathaus (city hall), a late 19th century, neo-gothic building with long wide staircases leading up to some spacious rooms where Global Village 97 was going to convene. Young people were setting up the computer center, called Open Space. There were places to meet and talk, tables for handouts, and several booths for NGOs to exhibit their projects. As soon as I entered I began encountering all sorts of people with interesting stories, projects, ideas, and talents. Just a few hours in country and I was going into a delightful overload which I would have to sort out each evening by making a journal entry.

Each person was engaged in projects that could not easily be explained in a few sentences, but I'll give it a try. Heiner Binking, Research Center for Applied Knowledge Processing, Ulm, Germany, is interested in spatial metaphors for information systems, how people participate in sharing ideas, and is a creative member of the Club of Budapest, a group that grew out of the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth ideas in the 1980's.

Robert Pollard is director of information habitat (I left off 8 diacritical marks since this will be transmitted in limited ASCII) in New York. He was involved with the U.N. conference in Istanbul in 1996, trying to facilitate information sharing through database construction and online fora. His main interest is in the process that can be used online to hold town meetings, to make decisions, and he is very aware of the limitations imposed when only a portion of participants have access to a particular technology. We took the subway to Radio Blue Danube, an English language station, for him to have a five minute interview about the conference and his particular concerns. This station is very popular, but it does not have a large budget within the Austrian State Radio bureaucracy.

When we returned, the press reception was underway. In one hall of the Rathaus, about 20 companies had set up booths: Siemens, Magnet--a large Austrian ISP running a FirstClass system for its customers, the Austrian Post and Telephone, telemedicine kiosks, electronic banking, and several city agencies doing mapping and urban planning showing the online components. These exhibits will be open to everyone, which the conference will attract about 100, each paying about $400 to attend.

The Multimedia Lounge is an avant-garde place for new media people to meet. Located in City Hall, the monitors and computers are located in areas for drinking coffee or just visiting. The chairs are supplemented by large plastic balls, partially filled with water for stability to provide for a temporary nesting place for users. However, they are not so comfortable that you'd want to sit and hack for hours at a time. On exhibit they had web cams, CU-SeeMe screens, comic chat (where online users have a comic character and can choose a mood and stance from a limited matrix (no extreme situations) and then embed that into the conversation which is tiled across the screen in black and white drawings. Franz did a video conference with some politician, but with all of these telecomm events, the kind of visual material that television seeks is usually so sparse, that it ends up being talking heads who have a hard time conveying what is really going on at such an online event.

But that is the challenge most of us working online have: making the excitement of the on-screen experience understandable to people who are disinterested or just don't know about the technology. Of course, others have tried it and don't share the enthusiasm that other proponents and boosters have.

Thursday: Cyber Cities - Cyber Regions

The day began with breakfast and a swirl of ideas from people talking over breakfast. If I don't make an entry here at least once a day, I'll forget much of what happened just because of the continuing flood of events and meetings.

This pre-conference was held in German. Included on the panel of speakers were planners and coordinators from several Viennese and European Commission projects including TeleCities whose participants included cities like Bologna, Stockholm, Antwerp, Berlin, Nice, and several others. They are pushing for the usual good things: social and economic development (and the lowering of unemployment which is generally much higher than the U.S.); fighting social exclusion; municipal regeneration projects.

This was another example of the relative meaning of "bottoms up" projects. When city agencies become involved, the EC considers it a bottoms up project; In Smart Valley's terms, involving large multi-national companies in a local project is "bottoms up" and to community organizers, "bottoms up" only can happen when individual citizens and neighborhood groups have strong input to an undertaking. So, on the EC scale, these TeleCities projects are bottoms up. In November 1997 the 3rd annual European Digital Cities Project will take place. Names such as "Dali", "Magica", INFOSonD, and Equality" were flashed on the screen as examples.

The City of Vienna was heavily represented at this meeting: city planners, MIS types, environmentalists. One project called Cicero was IBM-backed and consisted of information in a database about events and places for citizens and tourists to access. It looked a bit like CitySearch without the spatial component or detailed maps.

INFOSonD, information and services on demand, is one of the EC projects that is setting up touch-screen kiosks in various cities to provide social, employment, official, and senior citizen information. Unfortunately, none of the speakers took the time to tell any compelling story about a person or group that was affected by any of these projects. Perhaps they are at an early stage, but most of the information consisted of flow charts, time lines, and maps of towns in the projects. It would have been very hard for a journalist to write much that the average citizen would find meaningful.

Afterwards there were roundtable discussions in German, and I struggled for an hour or so, but the ability to understand pieces of conversation ("100,000 hits per week," "services to the citizen" "trans-national enterprises") was not enough for me to participate, so I hung out in a public area called Open Space. Tables, reading material, computers, and a constant flow of interesting people.

A friend says he can scope out conferences by the way people dress. That doesn't work for Global Village 97; it's a mix of some young people dressed casually, but most of the older folks are in business dress. The people I have met usually cut across disciplines. Kim Veltman interested in network interfaces and digital museum issues and the organization of knowledge; the other display a mix of technological optimism, a strong interest in both human and spiritual issues and how the tools affect users, and they seem to be members of groups devoted to new kinds of economies, future societies, and even avant garde art movements.

In the evening Franz Nahrada, Ulrike Pleyer, and a Greek doctor named Stamatis Skoutas made some remarks. Skoutas is from the island of Samos, off the coast of Turkey. It's population has dropped about 50% in the last fifty years. He is involved with a European telework project and hopes to improve the training of the medical staff on this island whose income depends on tourism.

Agnes Schierhuber, Member of European Parliament:

"I come from Waldviertal in upper Austria. I'm a farmer and a representative for rural areas. I go between my home town, Vienna, Strasbourg, and Brussels. The rural areas is more than farmers; jobs will be necessary and the rural areas will guarantee the well-being of our urban centers."

She stressed the need to adapt, to have the equipment, to accept new initiatives, but they must be supported by the state and the EU too. The EU focuses too much on competition and not enough on sustainability and the environment.

Franz made comments on sustainability and the environment including some references to other conferences and books, such as Tom Stonier's "Wealth of Information and the Emerging Global Community," which refers to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." The new economy of information will have the same effect on our society as the markets did centuries ago. He traced the effects of various changes in technology, as he stepped through various stages of history. Comments such as, "Wage labor was more viable than slavery, so the later went away" cropped up throughout the talk. He claimed that India won't need to build research libraries because they have the Internet. Unfortunately, the overlap between the content on the net and in a decent library like Northwestern or Heidelberg or University of Illinois is not that great.

He claimed "TV is not big brother, but it's a way for the citizens to spy on their leaders." He claims Yugoslavia was not in the communicative era and thus fell apart, but it was advanced in networking and basic telco services. I remember when the T1 line between Belgrade and Zagreb was cut in the early 90's as their country began to split up.

Continuing his optimistic thread he said that Western Europe is a haven of peace (excluding Spain, N. Ireland, France), and it will spread around the world because of the new technology. Problem solving ability will triple in the coming years. Oddly, he said he also had a pessimistic scenario, but did not have the time to share it.

Friday

Samuel Schubert is a consultant to UNIDO, the United Nations Industrial and Development Organization. He tried to give a talk in five parts on "Global Net Access: solutions for the entire planet." but he only finished one part: a status report on global connectivity with a variety of side anecdotes and information on new companies culled from their press releases.

He had some interesting things to say on Al Haig's Skystation, a company that uses stratospheric weather balloon 21 km above the earth. It covers 750 km2 and will cost 3 cents/min. Not in production yet. Italian company is doing the comms equipment. Canada, Argentina, and India, and Philippines are partners. Gateway will have a pcmcia port with their system. Probably be $300.

However, he made quite a few factual errors (ex: T1 was 1.2 megabits/second and placed VITA in Maryland and, and said that a dedicated T1 line costs $200/month in the U.S.) that left me doubting the accuracy of his other statements.

Our panel began with a lively talk by Stephan Wik of The Eco-Village Information Service in Ireland. For the first time we had a sense that a speaker was doing something at the street level and not just planning and coordinating and talking. His organization is funded by Gaia Trust in Denmark. It was founded at the Findhorn eco-village conference in 1995. It includes places like The Farm in Tennessee and similar communities in Russia, Australia, Colorado. The job was creating sustainable communities. The network was meant for sharing information with other villages, not to convert people to alternative life styles. Seven seed communities were chosen and a stand at the Istanbul UN conference in 1996 (Habitat II) was set up for other NGOs.

I spoke about the future of community networking, pointing to competition from many firms, problems with sustainability, and the formation of the new Association For Community Networking. My talk and the others will be in a book about the conference published by Falter Press in Vienna.

Marguritte Maurer of the Rosa Luxembourg Institute spoke about New Media, Knowledge Exchange and Participation. Her machine had crashed, so she did not have her presentation in a finished form, and she accused the moderator of giving more time to the men on the panel than to her. In truth, he let her have more time than we, but she was in a bad mood. We did however, have a good Q&A session. I have to commend the translators who worked non-stop all day to provide English or German versions of the talks.

It was, however, difficult to sit for long periods and hear a long stream of theory or explanation of organization charts or communications processes in either English or German. The breaks, fueled by good coffee and pastry, stretched out as people were reluctant to disengage from intense small group conversations. A suggestion for next year would be to have moderated small group discussions instead of so many papers and lectures. I took a walk around The Ring in Vienna. It is such a beautiful city, and you know why the inhabitants thought it was the center of the world about a century ago.

Robert Pollard of Information Habitat in New York, gave an overview of Meetings on the Internet:

Types of meetings: informal/exchange of news; brainstorming; planning; decision making. He went over the types of software, and platforms, but the process used is the issue facing me and my colleagues. If your group decides to go beyond chat, email, and undirected discussions, Pollard can help you with that next step. See his URL earlier in the report.

"Hypermedia: New Approaches to World Cultural Heritage and Knowledge" by Kim Veltman, a Canadian academic associated with McLuhan's widow, and very involved in digital art technology, gave a great performance by orchestrating two slide projectors, a VCR, a small monitor, and his expressive body language to pep the audience up at the end of a day with thousands of words and overheads. He made great use of images, of walk throughs of museums and galleries and historic sites. Nahrada provoked him by asking what good all this was, and many people came to his defense, and it allowed him more time to touch on some of his work with new network interfaces. He had interesting words about the kind of deals Bill Gates had been seeking from museums, and the next day we read of Microsoft's release of Russian high-res satellite imagery on MSN, but MSN is working with an American firm, not directly with the Russians.

Each of the video examples provided by Veltman had an intrusive logo in the lower portion of the screen. We see them more and more these days. I expect the day will come when people's eyeglasses are free but sponsored by different companies who place their logo in the lower portion of the lens so that all reality is brought to you by Sony of America or Deutsche Telekom.

Saturday

Andres Font from Mallorca, Spain was introduced as one of the movers and shakers of Europe. He is head of a development project that began about 1990 on the Balaeric Islands and is about see some physical results after so much planning. The ParcBit project: a model of the 21st century living and working space, is has a goal of making an integrated extension of La Palma by helping to turn The Balaerics into a business resort: a place to work and to relax, by increasing the knowledge based activities. (Support the university research and development centers; local and international firms; joint-ventures technology transfer; use of distance learning and telework). Font's presentation in English was polished; it was the same that he gave to bankers who will have to finance parts of the project. The Spanish telephone firm helped decided the technology platform, and this was done some time ago, so ISDN seemed to be prominent in his linking of environment-telecommunications-community.

It's about 140 hectares with a mix of business and residential. This was one of several planned communities we heard about, and some city planners and architects (and social activists) were less pleased with some of the compromises. One woman was upset at the segregation of business and housing, but Font said he knew the locals did not want to live in an area with a lot of commercial traffic. All of the projects operate in the real world, a world of compromises made to get political support, financing, and buyer acceptance.

I spoke to him about a couple of information projects in Hawaii that were meant to help that state's economy depend less on tourism. In the Balaeric Islands more than 80% of the income is from tourism. The project is a mix of European and Global tools and influences to achieve a local goal. While local architects were in the competition, the designer of the Pompidou Center in Paris was the winner. Construction begins later this year.

Twenty-five years ago construction began on Alt Erlaa, a series of high rises set in rows, growing out of a base of apartments and shopping malls and rising more than 20 stories over the plain outside of Vienna. Several posters displayed before the talk left many of us guessing where they originated: Estonia, Russia, Finland, France? One Canadian said they looked like Russian futuristic design: 10,000 people in 3000 units, with pools on the top of each building, their own malls, television, and now Internet connections. They are replacing the cable system with a new interactive one and category 5 wiring for future expansion. Many in the audience found the design oppressive, but the apartments are all full, and there is very little turn over. One Austrian told me that 30% of the Viennese are over 60, and this development has attracted a lot of old people.

The PTT has no restrictions on new technologies. Now new cable and category 5 wiring will be added. They have a local e-mail and Internet server with news groups for local purpose. The kids computer club want to put all the games on a local server for use by inhabitants. In addition there is a local television channel with teleshopping, linked to the stores in the malls below the apartments. The director was enthusiastic, "I am working in a very close environment. Local information will increase dramatically. Cheap local telephones will create more social contacts. Security is absolutely important for the inhabitants." Lots of criticism of this by the American Stonier. He thought it was a ghetto, but Heinz Sack said there was no alternative and that people were satisfied. The information in German is at <http://members.ping.at/vscons/mbr.htm>.

Waldviertal Adolf Kastner Landesbeauftragter fur das Waldviertal...this is very different from the planned city of Alt Erlaa. The largest town has 10,000 people but in an area the size of Vienna. How does telecomm come in for a rural area? If it does not, the region will not survive. In times like ours regions like this are doomed, Kastner claims. In 20 years another 37 % of the people will be lost while Vienna grows.So we are building structures to advance telecom usage. They are doing specialized farming, furniture making for the huge Vienna market. Political forces think that rural areas don't think they will need technology. phone call is 6 times the rate for Vienna. We now cover the area with POPs every 25 km. and have economic service for everyone. We want to provide some extra income to keep people on the farms. We think this will help us sell our products internationally. "Get the world into your house" is their motto.

Kastner says, "If you want to build a ship, get people to long for the wide, infinite ocean." He claims there is no political resistance to the project.

Rudolf Steinmetz is an architect with a rural Bavarian project called Communitas.

This was a strange talk. There is Indian tabla music playing while the German spoke in a loud, booming voice, almost drowning out the English translator I was listening to on headphones.

He and his colleague spoke about the threat of global policies, the loss of jobs, and the need for local control and social compacts (with quite a bit of framing of the issues by Steinmetz and his followers). At the same time they planned on linking up with Arthur D. Little for the project called "Global Village" which included various components: top housing quality at low prices and everyone obliged to take part "even the drug users and foreigners." He claimed the doctor will be required to treat his neighbors for free, as a way of developing social consciousness. I don't suppose Arthur D. Little will consult for free.

Money would "stay where it is" and only local products would be purchased. However, computers and Internet servers would be placed all over, and the computers could only be used to support social projects and nothing else. I asked if children began downloading and playing games from the Net, would there be problems? Steinmetz replied that parents who had signed the compact would be expected to enforce it with their children.

This upset a journalist who had a sharp exchange with Steinmetz, but I could not follow the gist of the shots fired back and forth. It was clear that Steinmetz had a strong vision of how society should be, and the rules set down for the organization would have to be adhered to, else the social compact would fail. It was a pretty extreme view, and it reminded me of the communes in the 60's where authoritarian figures set up rules much like those of the society many of the communards were fleeing in the first place.

Wouter Van Dieren from IMSA in Holland asked:

Will information technology help sustainability?

"Telecomms is about communication is about people. I prefer to speak without the tech. I'm confused about people speaking about the Internet to solve the problems of the world. We never succeeded in doing that.

"Can I.T. do it when all the other technologies did not? It's a religious desire. Club of Rome talks about the End Days, not the Second Coming. Why should there be a radical change for the better? I have my doubts. Technology is not a logic system; it's the Wizard of Oz. The Internet needs guidance by wise men who don't seem to be around. Is there a potential, or am I only gloomy?"

Given his doubts, can one think of local empowerment using information society?

A video conference with Brussels began, and the people on the their end look very uncomfortable with the VC . In order to see them well, we had to turn down our lighting. They could not see us well. The people in Brussels were glowering at the screen, moving from one side to the other, and it was evident that the computer and vc software had become the focus and not the message. Moreover, they were showing documents which would have better been sent on the net. The technology was quite intrusive, but I know it can be used quite well, but coordinating the three groups: the two panels and the audience, took up too much time.

I had to leave on Sunday morning and missed the last morning meetings and the first meeting of the Global Village Network. A draft of Nahrada's plan is at <http://www.give.at/give/gvndraft.htm> in English. He plans to post more notes later.

I left with no overarching conclusion about the future of sustainable communities and information technology. Certainly, many rural (and urban) sites believe that better connectivity and a trained work force will bring regional prosperity. But many areas are so conservative and reluctant to engage in a continual learning/changing process, that only a few will be engaged enough to make use of the telecomm tools that are being placed in these communities. Clearly, we need to follow the progress of these eco-villages, Mediterranean islands, Bavarian communes, and all the city projects funded by the European Union. I hope that the next conference will provide an update on the projects covered during the 1997 meeting.

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