The Nonprofit FAQ

How can I get general information on community and free nets?

There are several online resources that can help. The Association for Community Networks is at http://www.afcn.org. It is an active association of people who work on community networking projects worldwide. The website links to a list of existing local organizations maintained by the Vancouver (Canada) FreeNet at http://www2.vcn.bc.ca/freenets/ Another resource is the Community Technology Centers' Network at http://www.ctcnet.org/, which deals more with geographically based computer labs. For a related resource that with information and resources for "telecenters" worldwide, see http://www.telecentre.org/. For ongoing discussions, subscribe to the list Community and Civic Network Discussion List. To join the list send a message to listproc@list.uvm.edu with no subject, and message content sub communet yourfirstname yourlastname. Once subscribed, you will receive messages sent by other subscribers and you can post to the list by addressing messages to communet@list.uvm.edu. Archives are available at http://list.uvm.edu/archives/communet.html The Center for Democracy and Technology http://www.cdt.org/ is a jumping-off point for anyone interested in voting and citizen participation/engagement issues having to do with information technology. Also check out the resources of the Electronic Freedom Foundation at http://www.eff.org/ and the Electronic Privacy Information Center at http://epic.org for general observations on the challenges of operating online information services. The School of Information Science at the University of Michigan formerly had an ongoing project supporting community networks. Some of the products of that effort are still (January 2006) available through http://www.si.umich.edu/Community/about.html (in particular, the FAQs at http://www.si.umich.edu/Community/faq.html are still useful). The project itself appears to be no longer operating. (The "Directory" link, for example, returns an error.) The Institute for the Study of Civic Values offers an email discussion list which focusses on civic life and citizen participation. An outline of the Institute's mission and information on its discussion lists is at http://www.iscv.org/. Closely related is Neighborhoods Online, which has many links and resources for building and maintaining strong neighborhoods at http://www.neighborhoodsonline.net/index.html The the newsletter "The Network Observer" formerly listed in this space is no longer published by Phil Agre. However, the spirit and interest of the newsletter in matters of community (particularly in terms of Internet communities), technology and privacy lives on at http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/tno.html; his more recent writings are available at http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/rre.html, though his newsletter appears to have stopped being published in early 2005. Checked 1/17/00; updated 7/25/01; significantly edited with help from Shava Nerad, 1/28/06; added telecentre.org 2/3/06 -- PB