The gathering of the virtual tribes in Telluride

The idea of rural telecommuting as part of an intelligently planned process of sustainable growth is a seductive one. People who work with symbols and communications dream of troutstream and telecommuting. People who live in beautiful countryside wonder how to increase their economic base without ruining the characteristics of the geographical community that attracted them to small towns in the first place.

Dave Hughes has been spouting off about his electronic cottage at the base of Pike’s Peak for more than a decade; Hughes, with Frank and Reggie Odasz, was responsible for creating Big Sky Telegraph in Montana, a web of BBSes, conferencing systems and databases linking one-room rural schoolhouses, Indian reservations and colleges.

Pioneering a virtual community. Community networking, from Santa Monica’s PEN system to the Cleveland Free-Net, inspired dozens of second-generation pioneers. People like Steve Cisler, Mark Graham and Richard Civille were seeding, toolbuilding and spreading the word about the way virtual communities could help real geographical communities work more effectively and democratically. The Community Networking electronic mailing list leaped into life with dozens of people coming out of the Internet to announce community projects all over the world. (For more on virtual villages, see “Innkeeping in Cyberspace,” Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 2.)

A FESTIVAL OF IDEAS FOR NETWORK EVANGELISTS

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for Richard Lowenberg, who invited dozens of community networking evangelists to visit Telluride, Colorado, in late July, for an “Ideas Festival.”

The Ideas Festival was to be a three-day gathering of outside consultants and local citizens interested in creating a “Telluride Info-Zone,” a combination of low-cost, high-speed telecommunications access and community networking. Telluride already had a reputation as a still-somewhat-authentic mining town set in a huge box canyon of mind-boggling beauty. It was too remote, with its tiny airport, to go the way of Aspen.

But many people who encountered the special magic of the place when they attended the world-famous Telluride Film Festival or the Jazz or Bluegrass or Chamber Music Festivals (the locals have been known to throw a “nothing festival” on rare occasions when another festival wasn’t happening), have entertained the same thought that hit me when I first drove into town: Here is a charming old Western town at the foot of a beautiful, aspen-forested ski-slope, dwarfed by the cliff and waterfalls beyond it. If I had a connection to a high-speed Internet line, I could work here and fish half the day.

That seemed to be part of what was motivating the Telluride Institute, sponsors of the festival. Lowenberg’s associates from the Telluride Institute are involved in planning a real-estate development on a large meadow outside Telluride called “Skyfield,” a fully networked development of “trophy homes” and affordable housing.

Could people make a living in Telluride, plan growth in an intelligent manner, and still stay in touch with the world by connecting with the digital superhighways? The people invited, including the above-mentioned Hughes, Graham, Cisler and Civille, were there to inform and argue with Telluride citizens about how the Info-Zone ought to be planned.

It was fun to pull into town, walk to the basement of the city’s ancient, tiny opera house, and see half the people I only ever see online gathered around computers, or talking in animated groups.

The invited expertise was impressive, with large contingents from the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) and fortuitous local invitees like Lewis and Ann Branscombs of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Policy. Gene Youngblood, who wrote an interesting book called Expanded Cinema some 20 years ago, made one of his guerilla forays out of Santa Fe; and Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz brought the global Electronic Cafe, a live videolink over ordinary telephone lines between Telluride and Paris, Copenhagen and San Francisco. Randy Ross, an American Indian telecommunications activist, was impressive. People from US West weren’t afraid to stand up and speak out with the rest, and the locals were there too, from retirees to urban expatriates. It was a good mix, and it got off to a great start when Lowenberg introduced Doug Carmichael of Metasystems Design Group (who had helped set up Santa Monica’s PEN system). Carmichael claimed that he knew a sure-fire trick for making sure a group like this set its own agenda. He turned out to be right.

Setting the agenda. Carmichael pointed to a big bulletin board behind him on the small stage of the performance space of the Telluride Opera House. There were signs set at intervals along the top of the bulletin board: Friday and Saturday. There were a bunch of sticky notes with times written on them. Also on the stage were big pieces of paper and colored markers. If you want to discuss a subject, Carmichael explained, you write that subject on a big piece of paper, pick one of five possible locations, and pin it up under one of the days. Then put the sticky notes on the paper to indicate times. If people had intersecting topics, they could merge. Sticky notes could be traded. In 15 minutes of animated milling, we had an agenda.

A virtual version of the Ideas Festival had been happening on the WELL for several weeks before people converged in Colorado. Those locals who had been learning to communicate from the temporary Internet site in the Opera House basement were able to join discussions with Wellites all over the world, including community networking groups from the U.S. Northern Rockies and from Austria.

Reverberation happens. When the people in Telluride broke into discussion groups, each group selected a reporter, who entered the report into the WELL, so those who were only in Telluride in their disembodied form could read and comment. It worked amazingly well. The mix of outsiders and locals, the technological infrastructure, Lowenberg’s ringmastery, the feeling of what a hopeful and potentially powerful time and place Telluride in the 1990s could be, all made for a sense of things happening here and now that would reverberate far beyond the Opera House in July 1993.

EQUAL ACCESS, SOCIAL CONTRACTS AND DESIGN

Emerging themes were:

• Ensure equity of access before you open up for business;
• Educate people in the unique properties of many-to-many messaging;
• Allow a local culture to emerge, but don’t be cut off from the global conversation;
• Social contracts and rules of behavior are best argued early and long before making any decisions;
• There are pitfalls and benefits to the way people behave in cyberspace, and the better these are known, the less pain is involved in learning about them;
• Top-down design is unworkable, don’t even try; and
• Learn from previous experiments.

Telluride is wealthy — a small wooden house in downtown Telluride is half a million dollars — and isolated, and mostly white. It isn’t the paragon for rural telecommunities, but it is — by virtue of the way it has invited the world to watch — an example of telecommunity.

The success or failure of the Info-Zone won’t be known for a few years. And whether doubling the size of the population that can live in Telluride’s natural splendor without spoiling that splendor remains to be seen. The Info-Zone and Skyfield are experiments worth watching.

Howard Rhinegold