Spontaneous Community: Ad-Hoc Networks

Overview

In early 1993, a year or so before the Internet was a household word, I was playing around with the idea of 'electronic community.' I was the editor of PC Techniques Magazine (a programmers' magazine that later became Visual Developer and is now defunct, alas) and wrote an editorial in the August/ September 1993 issue that caused a bit of a stir. It was called 'The Cableton Project' and it was an open question to my readership: If you lived in a small town with ubiquitous high-bandwidth connectivity, how would it change your life? What would you do with it? How would you work?

Opinion was almost evenly split between those who loved the idea of Cableton and would move there in a minute, and those who felt that small towns ( networked or not) were hateful places where Blacks, gays, and Koreans were lynched on sight.

Whew. Stepped right into that one, didn't I?

My mailbox boiled with the debate for most of a year, and in all the yelling over 'family values' and other city vs. country social dynamics (echoes of the 'blue vs. red' phenomenon that emerged with the 2000 national elections) we got distracted from the technical issues standing in the way of implementing a heavily networked town.

Then, almost as a sidenote, one letter writer pointed out that the big barrier to creating Cableton was… the cable. Digging ditches and laying fiber costs a lot of money. How about putting short-range data radios up on poles, like TV antennas, and creating a wireless network?

It took ten years, but it's happening, and I'm glad to say I saw it coming. Cableton is being created-not where I originally expected it to be, and not with cables. It's a little too soon to offer you a blueprint (the technology is still in furious flux) but we've begun to see groups of people create wireless electronic communities using cheap Wi-Fi gear and obsolete 'doorstop' PCs. In this chapter I'll explain what some of the issues and challenges are, and who's in the forefront of the effort. There's still a lot of room for experimentation, and if you're good with both networking and community dynamics, you could almost literally change the world.

I find it intriguing that the World-Wide Web went live just about the time I was writing the original Cableton editorial. Before the Web, the Internet wasn't about content. It was about other people. The Web distracted us hugely from what could be accomplished by person-to-person communications. In the past few years, pure 'content' on the Web (documents, audio, video) has begun facing strong competition from forums and chat rooms using the Web simply as a foundation technology.

Again, it's about other people. It's always been about other people. Hollywood is just a distraction.

There are a number of different levels at which Wi-Fi communities can happen: on your dining-room table, at local community hotspots, and across entire towns. We'll start small, with ad-hoc wireless connections in small groups, and go from there to the promise of the heavily networked city.