FROM ELECTRONIC INSULARISM TO CONNECTED COMMUNITIES
by Jeffrey Shapard
IEC/TWICS, Tokyo, Japan


I have one purpose in this short essay: to convince you of the need for
more internetworking to build bridges and connect our online communities.
We suffer from too much electronic insularism, partially due to simple
ignorance of the options already available, and partially due to insidious
policies by narrow-minded administrators struggling to maintain
centralization and control over your channels of communication. I will
discuss what I see as the problems, particularly as they regard the
domains of personal computers, computer conferencing, and commercial host
computer systems. Some of my opinions are rather strong, and if you would
like to step out back and discuss them further, my internetwork mail
address is listed in an afterward.

I am no expert on internetworking, as I have been buried too long in
centralized systems myself and have just begun to learn about the great
world beyond. While I frequently wander out through the routes we have
available on the public data networks and international packet switching
systems, and I have visited a few other centralized islands here and
there, these connections require that I go out from my own community and
join another, and learn yet another set of access procedures and commands,
and continue to journey out regularly in order to maintain any new
relationships I establish. It is a lot of work and time and expense.

I would like to give credit to some of the people who have helped me open
my eyes. Russ Briggs of DA Systems created DASnet [Briggs1987], a service
that does mail forwarding between all sorts of previously isolated
commercial systems, and he explores the often uncharted electronic seas
and helps us find routes to the people we want to communicate with. John
S. Quarterman of Texas Internet Consulting co-authored a seminal little
overview of internetwork connections [Quarterman1986] and is currently
buried deep in the rough draft of an incredibly comprehensive guide to the
mysteries of what he calls "The Matrix". Stephan Meyn of GMD nudged me
into joining him in exploring the fun we could have setting up an X.400
mail link (see [Boiardi1988ab] for an overview of X.400) to West Germany
for his organization's Tokyo office. And, Kenji Rikitake of TWICS and
Tokyo University keeps trying to educate me about protocols and convert me
to TCP/IP and 4.2BSD Unix. He is also involved in a variety of ongoing
internetworking experiments here on TWICS, at his university lab, with his
packet radio group, and late at night in his apartment. These guys are
doers, and I am going to talk about it.

Ignorance is widespread. While the academic and research communities in
computer and information science have been networking their increasingly
numerous host and workstation computers for years, and building gateways
between these networks, and while some of this valuable technology has
drifted out into major corporations and large organizations, the domains
of personal computer users and commercial host systems have been left
behind. Rather, they have not been paying enough attention to what is
going on elsewhere and have missed out on some good things.

With the significant exception of FidoNet bulletin boards and a few
progressive conferencing systems, this lack of internetworking is
especially prevalent in the personal computer world. How far would we have
come if all those mainframes of the 60s and minicomputers of the 70s and
supercomputers of the 80s been left standing isolated from the data and
resources of each other, let alone from the more precious human resources
of their various user communities? Yet, how many PCs are standing alone,
or even modemless, and how many PC users who do connect with others
through their machines ever go beyond a couple local BBSs or centralized
commercial e-mail or "information utility" systems? If you have access to
a FidoNet BBS, then at least you can exchange ideas with other people on
Fido boards elsewhere in that network and beyond, if you know the
gateways, all from the comfort and familiarity of your own local system.
And if you happen to run your own FidoNet BBS, then you can do this from
your own kitchen, or wherever you keep your machine.

Ignorance can be cured by watching and listening more closely, and this
will be easier to accomplish as information about networking becomes more
accessible, such as when John S. Quarterman's book gets published. And, if
you subscribe to a commercial system that is linked to DASnet, you can
expand your horizons immediately. However, a deeper problem lies in the
attitudes of the administrators of many centralized unconnected systems.

There seem to be more than just a few system administrators who do not
want any inter-connections between their systems and others, and another
way to look at this is to say that they don't want their users talking to
users of other systems, or vice versa. Therefore, if someone on such a
system wants to exchange mail with someone elsewhere, then she needs to go
elsewhere to do it. The inconvenience, trouble, and expense of doing this
thereby inhibit most such interaction, unless the need is great enough and
the relationship long-term enough to make it worth the ordeal. But this is
hardly compatible with the evolving organic social structures the media of
this new age of communications can support for us. System administrators
have several reasons for their anti-networking attitudes.

The first and most legitimate reason is security. A group or organization
may find it compatible with their goals to inhibit easy interaction and
information exchange between their members and people elsewhere. The
nature of what they are doing and trying to keep secure may possibly raise
other philosophical or political questions, but the point here is that
security is an important issue that the administrator or operator of every
computer system, including PCs, must confront and deal with. On the other
hand, how many organizations need to lock their people away in a lab
buried in a remote mountain, and cut them off from all contact with the
world beyond? The most important aspects of security are trust and an
awareness of what information should be kept secure and how to do it. A
burglar's best accomplice is someone who leaves their doors and windows
unlocked and their valuables lying around. Security begins and ends with
the users.

----

A second reason for lack of internetworking that I have heard given has to
do with control, and related aspects of reliability and responsibility.
One system administrator of a very large American commercial system told
me that their gang of lawyers warned them that they might be held
responsible for any trouble delivering electronic mail through
internetworks, and they felt that they could only guarantee reliability if
they controlled all the connections themselves. So, the users of that
system cannot exchange messages with people elsewhere. Another very large
American commercial system has implemented an electronic mail gateway with
a very large electronic mail service, but refuses a smaller operation the
right to offer a similar service to their subscribers.

A third reason, I charge, is economic hegemonism. Administrators of large,
centralized systems may see internetwork connections as a threat, since
people might be able to get an account on some cheap little local
conferencing system, or even a neighborhood BBS, yet be able to exchange
mail with their paying customers. They have big investments in their
centralized facilities and services, and they hope to protect them by
forcing anyone who wants access to any part of them to pay for it
directly. The problem here is that someone who just wants to be able to
send mail to someone on, say, GEnie or CompuServe, may not really have any
need or desire to pay sign-up and subscription fees to get access to all
the other interesting things these services offer. Imagine if you could
only send letters to people in Paris if you rented an apartment there, or
you could only call people in Tokyo if you paid a big deposit for a
telephone number there.

A fourth reason is that network gateways and links can be a lot of work to
set-up and maintain. As a system administrator myself, I know how hard it
is to look objectively at anything that is going to add more work to what
is already an tremendous burden. The most difficult part of an
internetwork connection is billing, but there is also a lot of work that
needs to be done to integrate internetwork gateways with various
electronic mail and conferencing software to make it more transparent and
easier to use. At the Electronic Networking Association conference in May,
1988, the developers of the CAUCUS, CoSy and PARTICIPATE conferencing
software met and agreed on the need to work together to develop a way to
network between their systems.

While certain very large commercial systems continue their insular
policies, and while others reach out and link up with fellow giants,
smaller systems look to their neighbors and to friends like DASnet. You
might already be a subscriber to a system that has a DASnet link, and this
means that today you can exchange mail with an estimated 3 million people.
Some smaller systems are networking directly with like-minded partners,
such as the hourly links between Peacenet/Econet in California and
GreenNet in London. Other systems are connecting up to some of the large
existing non-commercial networks, for example, The Well's link to UUCP,
which is an incredibly widespread and anarchic cooperative network of Unix
systems, and even some PC users are running software such as UUPC that
lets their machines run the protocols they need to become nodes.

Consider this scenario. You wake up in the morning, and after the first
cup of coffee, you turn on some music and wander over to your PC to check
your mail. During the night, your trusty tool and window to the world has
automatically logged in to your favorite BBSs, a local conferencing system
community, and one large unavoidable information utility you can't seem to
get to any other way, and it has forwarded outgoing messages and picked up
messages and inbox listings for you to deal with when you have time. You
scan through them, noticing that some of the BBS messages and conferencing
system notes have come from systems in other parts of the world.

Some of your online friends never deal with any system beyond their own
desktop PC, and have everything mailed right in through the networks, but
you like the old-time community feeling of some BBSs and conferencing
systems, and you keep accounts open on them and even login by hand once in
awhile, when you have time. Then, you tell your PC to check your office
system. (Since you use this line both for personal and business use, and
for voice and data, your office system doesn't forward mail on to you
directly, as it does for some of your colleagues who work at home several
days a week. Also, you are very security conscious, so you prefer to
monitor calls into your office system.)

When you are done, and have had breakfast, you ride your bicycle to your
office, and after greeting your colleagues, you sit down at your desk and
turn on your workstation. It is connected to a local area network, and you
have an electronic mail and conferencing system installed on a node
somewhere. You think it is within your office somewhere, but it may be in
the office across town.

You can exchange messages with anyone in your company, and with just about
anyone else online, right from your desk, and you are engaged in a project
team with a half dozen other people now. Only three of them are in your
company and on your company's network, and only one of them is in your
town. The others are on systems elsewhere, but this is transparent -- you
are all in the same conference -- and talking to them is as easy as
talking to the people in your office's Friday night planning conference,
which is a little underground activity you use for unofficial quality
control and personnel morale. You check your inbox, let the notes for some
topics wait, read your personal messages, look in to see what is happening
in your project team conference, send a message to someone in Finland,
laugh at a joke sent by someone from Indonesia, and get to work in your
connected community.

How much of this have you implemented already? Some people are already
here, or far beyond. Talk to your local system administrator and ask them
what they are doing about it.

One extreme position is to abandon all central hosts, and each person's PC
will be their own window to the world. But many of us like the sense of
'place' we get when we login and visit some particular system, and most
individual PC users are not willing to dedicate a phone line just for
receiving calls to receive mail on their computer. It is more convenient
and appropriate, and usually more economical, to use a local host computer
for electronic mailboxes and conferencing. The ideal situation is to be
able to enjoy the familiarity of your favorite system while being able to
exchange messages and join group discussions with people anywhere.

If you have never exchanged messages with someone in an electronic
community beyond the one(s) you have immediate access to, I hope that you
will sit back and think about the possibilities this can open up for you,
personally or professionally. The tools we have can do so much, but no
more than what our imaginations demand of them. Put yours to work.

Citations: ---------

Boiardi, Ruben. 1988a.
X.400: What is it? Part I. Netweaver, Feb '88, 4:2:7.

Boiardi, Ruben. 1988b.
X.400: What is it? Part II. Netweaver, Mar '88, 4:3:6.

Briggs, Russ. 1987.
Parallel Conferences. Netweaver, Mar '89, 3:3:7-8.

Quarterman, John S., and Josiah C. Hoskins. 1986.
Notable Computer Networks.
Communications of the ACM, Oct '86, 29:10:pp932-971.


Afterword: --------- Jeffrey Shapard is a die-hard Montanan now living and
working in Tokyo, where he operates a conferencing system called TWICS. Is
is also the Moderator of ENA. He can be reached as Jefu@DCTWCS.DAS.NET
through DASnet from a system near you.