Networking Tompkins County conference updates some Internet dreams

By Bill Steele

The annual Networking Tompkins County conference is often a place where people share their dreams. This year it was a place to celebrate a dream that came true.

At the first conference, in 1995, Ithaca entrepreneur Homer Wilson Smith shared his seemingly crazy plan to go into business as the area's first commercial Internet service provider. He would, he said, let subscribers connect to the Internet by way of a roomful of modems and other equipment he would set up in his apartment.

Today Smith's Lightlink service is just one of several local and national Internet service providers (ISPs) in the county, and at the conclusion of this year's conference, Smith was presented with the second annual IthacaNet Award for Achievement in Networking Tompkins County for his role as a pioneer. A show of hands indicated that more than half of the people in the audience at the presentation were Lightlink subscribers.

Some 200 people attended the 1998 conference held last Saturday on the Ithaca College campus. The annual event is sponsored by IthacaNet, a non-profit group founded in 1993 to "increase awareness of access to and content on the Internet, by, for and about the people of Tompkins County." Attendees included librarians, educators, government officials and representatives of computer-related businesses.

"Community networking hasn't gotten the attention it should, in the shadow of the Internet," said Steve Cisler, the conference's keynote speaker. Cisler, a former Apple researcher, is now a full-time advocate of community networking. He offered examples of the ways in which communities throughout the nation are using computer networks to make information available to citizens and encourage discussion of local issues.

This year's pioneers are those putting computer communications to work in Tompkins County businesses, schools and libraries, and conference participants heard reports on some of these enterprises:

• Thanks largely to local ISPs and web design companies, many local businesses now have World Wide Web pages, and at least one, the Made in New York store, sells its wares over the Internet.

• Jonathon Levy, associate director of the Cornell Office of Distance Learning, described early experiments in courses shared between Cornell and other universities, using a special classroom in which students and teachers on several campuses can interact via video displays. Cornell currently has two such courses in progress, he said. Tompkins-Cortland Community College is also offering online courses, courses shared with other community colleges and college-level courses that high school students can take in their own classrooms.

• Internet access in schools and libraries raises interesting legal and ethical issues, and one workshop was devoted to the question of whether or not to "filter" such access, for example to prevent children – or for that matter, adults – from connecting to web sites offering pornography.

• For the technically minded there were discussions of "pipe issues" – how to move more data faster. Richard Cogger, an assistant director of Cornell Information Technologies and a member of the Tompkins County Electronic Futures Committee, said that Time-Warner Cable is planning to offer a service that would allow users to connect at fairly high speeds over the television cable system, and Bell Atlantic will be offering a high-speed system called ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line). Meanwhile, there are plans to connect local institutions and ISPs directly to one another. Now, Cogger said, if you connect through a commercial ISP to a Cornell web site, the connection goes through Pennsauken, N.J.

New York State Assemblyman Marty Luster (D-125th) closed the conference with a warning that even forward-looking Tompkins County is in danger of being divided into "technological haves and have-nots." He noted that while two-thirds of American families with incomes over $75,000 per year have computers, only 12 percent of families earning under $10,000 do. And while the Tompkins County Public Library offers 10 Internet terminals, only 16 of the 29 libraries countywide have any kind of Internet access, he said.

As chair of the Assembly Committee on Libraries and Education Technology, Luster has sought $11.4 million in state funding for computer technology in public and school libraries. So far, he said, $2 million per year was made available in 1996 and 1997, and $3 million to $6 million may be appropriated this year.

"As much as the challenge to the 20th century was to make everyone word-literate, now on top of that is the challenge to make everyone technologically literate," Luster said. "If we can give people equal access to technology, I think that is one of the keys to leveling the other disparities."