This report covers progress made during the end of the first month of the Club's activity. It may be useful to Consume Clubs in other parts of the country and as feedback to Consume in London.
Progress is measured against actions on
the (draft) plan. See club website.
During this period, the most active tasks have been:
This report also discusses some issues arising from these.
Note that no technical/implementation work is planned until a "critical mass" of members is achieved. There is more about this later.
The aims of the club have been drafted. The main aim is to setup a network throughout the area.
There has been an attempt to form a committee. At this time, it is still a committee of one.
A website has been setup and provides an outline of the club, network technical summary, draft plan, promotional brochures, membership enrolment and feedback mechanism.
About 30 members have enrolled. The members have varying degrees of enthusiasm and scepticism about the project. Mostly they are "ordinary" Internet users who want more of the same only faster and cheaper.
It is not easy to "convert" people who just want e-mail and the occasional browse. It should be emphasised that at present there is no mad rush of people to join.
Approaches have been made to many local organisations including the University, colleges, local councils and various voluntary organisations. An attempt to get free promotion at the Arndale shopping centre has met with a blank. They want to charge for a stand. An attempt to get promotion at local computer fairs is still underway. The organisers allow this for a local computer club, so there's a chance of getting a free stand. Adverts in the local newspapers are planned.
Currently promotion is based on the characteristics of an hypothetical consume-based system. If people like the characteristics (e.g. High Speed, Low cost, services, user-ownership, community, etc.) they will be willing to subscribe as Speculative members without immediate commitment.
It may be necessary to provide a local "demonstrator" system to convince more sceptical people. This is a future task. Remember that people have already been bombarded by ISPs offering free this and free that, and many have been disappointed and are quite rightly wary about Consume's offering.
The following seem important and some relate to issues raised in the Consume mailings.
It was provisionally decided that the club would not handle any money or property. Thus all equipment would be owned by the members. Effectively, when asking for support, e.g. from University, Councils and other voluntary organisations we initially seek "participation" rather than resources.
If the organisation does not want to participate, sponsorship is still possible as a private matter between a member and the sponsor to assist the member's participation. For example an Arts Board may wish to sponsor an artist to provide Media Arts on the network and the funding may cover the cost of equipment (i.e. a node).
The network is bare. It just transmits. Additional services are needed to make it attractive. Many potential members ask what benefits they get beyond their existing 56k "Internet" - and except for raw speed it is hard to say exactly what they will get. (At present it is not clear how they will even get "Internet" without a lot of hassle.)
To overcome this, a set of Services (possibly the Killer Apps of high speed wireless networking) are proposed (see website) so that working groups can develop and help members exploit them. Personally, I am looking forward to having "Home Servers". So it is top of the list. [Please don't say its not possible.]
So far Consume nodes are working for a handful of "experts". For Consume to be accepted generally requires that:
How long has consume been running? How many live nodes are there? Well, its obvious (to me) that it is progress at snails pace. To speed progress, the Popularisation requirements above, need to be met.
Also, when trying to promote the network, I feel like the worlds first Telephone Salesman :- "You can talk to your friends a long way away". "But my friends do not have a telephone".... etc.. Consume has to "Break in" and overcome the initial resistance (just as telephony did).
Much more thought has to be given to this aspect. Perhaps more than to technical aspects.
L&D is a densely populated area approximately 10Km x 6Km and if one node is needed every Kilometre, then 60 nodes (70 nodes if you include every corner of the grid) would be the minimum to give everyone connectivity and cover the entire ~150,000 population. The target is therefore to get at least 60 members. It doesn't sound too dificult. In practice, for geographical and locational reasons, it may require many more members than this to provide full connectivity but we have a target. Also a membership of 60 is probably sufficient to give a spread of skills and interests and to form a worthwhile community.
The excellent node mapping facility on the Consume website enables the connectivity check.
The advantage of this approach is that (1) and (2) can progress independently of all technical issues.
If Critical Mass cannot be achieved within a reasonable time, there is no point in proceeding.
During the time spent assessing the local interest, Consume (in London) will be progressing technical matters such as software, IP addressing, legal issues, peering agreement, Internet access, etc. Also during this time the cost of the hardware is likely to fall so delay on installing equipment is an advantage.
Paul Clarke (Acting Local Co-ordinator)
Dated: 31 Jan 01