Efrem  Lipkin

    My parents had to deal with HUAC. I had the utterly surreal
    experience--I was in the Civil Rights Movement--I had this surreal
    experience... apparently a government agent tried to plant a copy of
    the Daily Worker on me.... [T]he privacy protection we want and that 
    we historically needed -- is from the government.

    Efrem Lipkin, at the CFP 1994 Encryption Panel. 

Efrem Lipkin, along with Lee Felsenstein and Ken Colstad, founded the
first community network system, Community Memory, in Berkeley, in order to
facilitate the free exchange of information around the world. Participants
could visit the network from the Public Library, or Milt's Laundromat, or
a community center, or another public place, and read fora (at no cost),
share their thoughts (for a quarter), or start a new forum (for a dollar).
All the material on the network--a " discussion around Peoples' Park,";
forums on " Grateful Dead information", "Look before you Join,", "Senior
Centers' Lunch Menus,", among other things; the " Vietnam Day Committee,",
and "confessions of programming addicts,", and the list goes on--was
created directly by community members.

Rock musician and activist Country Joe McDonald and a diverse group of
volunteers instituted the "Alameda County War Memorial", a searchable
database of all the county's war dead from the two World Wars, the Korean
War, and the Vietnam War, to which people could add names or personal
messages. [The information in the preceding two paragraphs was culled from
a much more complete history of public cyberspace.]

Lee Felsenstein, one of Lipkin's original partners at Community Memory,
has this to say about its genesis:

"Industrialization and Privatization The village square is a commons - it
belongs to no one but is used by all. The agora is a commons of
information - a way of interacting. It is not property.

The process of industrialization began in England with the 'Enclosures
Act' which deeded the village common grazing lands to whomever could build
a fence around them. Needless to say, the landlords were the only ones who
could raise the capital to do this, so the common lands went to them. This
enabled them to enlarge their holdings and the resultant surplus of income
over expenses provided the pool of capital upon which the process of
industrialization was based. The peasants lost a source of food and were
driven into dependence on what wages they could get from serving as hired
labor to the landowner. All in all, a very tidy move by the landowners.
Too bad about the resulting starvation and homelessness, but, of course,
there were too many peasants, anyway. The whole thing was justified
because the landowners could supposedly make more efficient use of the
land than the peasants.

As urbanization proceeded, a somewhat similar process of privatization of
the commons of information took place. The place where people could gather
and exchange information began to lose its function to the gradually
centralizing mass media. There was no money in an agora which could be
concentrated at some central point. But a newspaper could command a price
for advertising space. So small-town papers were supplanted by
larger-scale publications which could underprice them. I remember vivdly
the neighborhood shopping paper which was printed in a storefront in my
native Philadelphia neighborhood. It was filled with little gossip items,
each one of them of importance only to a small circle of people, but the
totality of which chronicled and defined the life of the community (a
Jewish neighborhood for more than one generation). It couldn't compete for
advertising dollars with larger throwaways which printed only ads and
'boilerplate' generic news that was produced nationally.

All of the media had the characteristic of concentration. The only
anomalies were the telephone system (but the directory was concentrated)
and the postal system (which was socialized). All the rest became
structured with a central point through which the information is funneled
and from which information is distributed in identical form. I call this a
'broadcast' structure, and print media qualify as well as electronic
media. I remember the moment in 1969 when I looked out my window down the
street and saw the living room windows glowing with the blue light of TV.
I realized that they were all getting their information from Walter
Cronkite in New York, but that we had no ready way to get information from
each other.

In the '60's I thought that the cause of re-establishing functioning
communities could be served by the newly established 'underground press',
and for a while I helped at the Berkeley Barb, one of the oldest such
papers. But I saw the structure of that medium determine its economics and
thereby its content., and by 1970 I knew that broadcast media were never
going to serve the cause of decentralization of power within society.

An encounter that year with mainframe-based network computing (through
learning Basic at the SDC training facilities) alerted me to the fact that
such a network had no geographical restrictions and that information items
could be made accessible to variously defined groups of users. It was
clear to me that through computer networks it would be possible to support
the information needs of an overlapping set of communities of interest.
But where to get a computer in those days?

Fortunately, other people had come to the same conclusions and a group
named Resource One, Inc. had formed in San Francisco to secure a
timesharing computer for roughly this purpose. In August of 1973 we were
able to try an idea proposed by Efrem Lipkin and placed terminals in
public places (a record store in Berkeley, followed by a branch of the SF
Public Library) which people could use as a bulletin board. We called it
'Community Memory'.

What happened was that an agora appeared, with an unknowable number of
different needs, desires, suggestions, proposals, offers, statements,
poems and declarations croppping up. We, who had expected only a few
categories of classified-ad items, were amazed at the discovery. It became
clear that the crucial element was the fact that people could walk up to
the terminals and use them hands-on, with no one else interposing their
judgment. The computer system was not interposing itself between the
individuals who used it, either. It was serving a 'secondary' information
function, like the telephone directory, except that you could make your
own rules as to how you were listed. When you completed your transaction
on the computer, you knew who you really wanted to talk with. The
following transactions were carried out through other nonbroadcast media,
mostly the phone. " ...and this to say about our future: The Challenge

If it's going to survive, the agora of the future will have to be designed
somewhat better from the perspective of non-technical users.

Right away, there will be objections from some quarters as to the
desirability of letting in the non-techs. But they will be there whether
we want them or not - the only question is whether the agora will be open
or controlled for the benefit of a few. Technology matters. The personal
computer took the form it did (with open architecture) because a
hobbyist-based industry was free to set its own criteria without guidance
from the investment community for the first two years of its life. IBM
fielded the 5100, a thoroughly closed architecture machine, as soon as it
could following the PC eruption in 1975. They had to withdraw that machine
by 1979 and adopt open architecture in order to have impact in this
marketplace. Even after they grabbed the market share with the 5150 (The
IBM PC), they couldn't control the technology and close it up. The design
continued to propagate like a virus through the technological body and has
left them behind. Community Memory did not dissolve after the 1973
experiment. That system was turned off in January 1975 and the people
involved decided to set up their own nonprofit corporation, The Community
Memory Project, in 1977 in Berkeley. Under Lipkin's technical leadership
we made a number of good calls (Unix, relational databases, X.25 as future
leading technologies) and worked out a solution to the problem of system
centralization through packet networking. It took longer than anticipated,
but in 1984 we put up a pilot version of the intended system at four
public locations in Berkeley. In 1989, assisted by a Telecommunications
Education Trust grant from the California Public Utilities Commission, we
put up a ten-terminal system using a front-end/back-end architecture. We
have continued to upgrade the user interface and have brought it to the
level of a stable design with designed-in upgrade paths. Most
significantly, this was done without classical marketing research, but
with direct involvement of a base of users over a number of years. This
was 'patient capital' in action. Had we gone the usual for-profit route,
we would have had a product out quickly, but it would have been
indistinguishable from the others and designed with no input from users.

Douglas Schuler described Community Memory as 'a virtual People's Park' in
his 1994 article, "Community Networks: Building a New Participatory
Medium" :

Community Memory - A Virtual People's Park

Community Memory of Berkeley, California, created by Efrem Lipkin, Lee
Felsenstein, and Ken Colstad, was the first community network [14].
Initially started in the mid 70's as a follow up to experiments conducted
in 1972 and 1973 on unmediated two-way access to a message database
through public computer terminals, Community Memory was conceived as a
tool to help strengthen the Berkeley community. Their brochure states that
"strong, free, non-hierarchical channels of communication - whether by
computer and modem, pen and ink, telephone, or face-to-face - are the
front line of reclaiming and revitalizing our communities." Their
commitment to serving those without ready access to information technology
is demonstrated by numerous training programs and their insistence that
all Community Memory terminals be in public places: terminals can be found
in libraries and in laundromats but can't be reached via modem or from the
Internet. Community Memory has adopted a creative approach to funding:
They offer coin-operated terminals which are free to read, but require 25
cents to post an opinion and a dollar to start a new forum.

Community Memory has pushed its principles to their logical limits.
Anonymity, for example, is possible because users are not required to use
their own name or register to use the system. Perhaps the most noteworthy
of their convictions is that all of the information on the system is
community generated. This has two important implications. The first is
that no central authority of any kind establishes what information is
available. The other is that information (such as Internet newsgroups) is
not imported from other sites. One of their most noteworthy projects is
the "Alameda County War Memorial Project" in which information on every
deceased veteran in Alameda County is stored on the system. According to
their newsletter, "Friends and family can share their thoughts and
reminscences at the memorial screen of their friend or relative. This
unique capability enables the Alameda County Veteran's Memorial to become
a growing piece of community history."