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Community Networking Conference, page 4
Desenzano del Garda is a small town about 70 miles from Milan situated at the foot of a beautiful lake. It attracts tourists year round, but like most vacation towns it has a life apart from tourism. I visited to learn more about the Onde Project, whose goals include making the citizens "protagonists in their own future" through computer training; use of a civic network; information; and awareness of the new technology by using public access stations in city hall, the library, and the media lab. Working with the schools to help promote lifelong learning is also a major goal. Gigi met me on the main square just off the lake, and after a lunch of fried olives and pumpkin ravioli we visited the major access sites to look at the system. A local ISP's modems are co-located with Onde's in the city hall, and in return they get a 64 Kbps connection to the Internet. He was pleased with a university thesis recently completed in Turin that showed a great deal of support (beyond the city funds allocated for Onde) for the program. If you read Italian, write him for more info on this survey. He feels that the project has reached a point where it would survive if he left or died or changed his focus, but there is some opposition to the project because it competes with other ISPs and because it is seen as a move for more power for Tagliapietra. The FirstClass system seems to promote a reasonable amount of discussion and debate, but certain names dominate, as they do in other systems. In other words, people with a lot of opinions and time on their hands come to control online discourse, just as they can in actual settings. The city gets many requests via the network, and they try to respond in a timely manner, but some online users think in terms of hours rather than days and are impatient. Onde is supported by Telecom Italia and local ISPs. Members of Onde can use FirstClass software to connect via TCP/IP (194.177.112.4, port 3004). Readers of this report can look at the Onde Web server (which is not interactive) at http://www.onde.net/. Also, an annual conference on children and multimedia takes place in Desenzano each September. This year's meeting is sponsored by IBM, Lego, and Microsoft.
After the first day of the conference some European representatives met to talk about an Association of European Community Networks. Like the American discussions as well as those for the Milan regional association, it was evident that each person had a rather different view of what purpose such an association would serve and who should be a member. How much resources to devote to influencing European policy (and the flow of money for Information Society projects)? How much for information gathering and dissemination, for conferences and planning meetings? If businesses are members, what is their role in the organization? The evening ended with a wonderful buffet dinner at the Chamber of Commerce overlooking the Milan cathedral square. It was a warm soft evening, and dozens of small groups of citizens met and strolled around the large plaza several floors below our dinner site. The weather, the gentle crowds, and the way people were content to linger in the public square reminded me of a similar experience in Zadar, Yugoslavia, a third of a century earlier. Even with the squeals of cell phones and radios, people gathering on a summer evening for casual conversation is still a very evocative Mediterranean pastime. As busy as Milano is, people do know how to relax.
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