Network offers info, resources

The Women’s Information Resource and Exchange network wants to change the demographics of the virtual community, which today is estimated to be made up of more than 85 percent men. Its new electronic information service, known as WIRE, has a charter to bring women online and to provide “a safe and welcoming haven where women can assemble and learn.”

The network, which went live early last month, offers private electronic mail services and access to the Internet. WIRE also provides public forums on careers and finance, parenting, health and fitness, arts and leisure, learning, technology and politics as well as a section called “Herstory,” which contains historical documents, legislative bills, Supreme Court decisions and profiles of famous women in history.

Making it easier. WIRE has a simple icon-based, point-and-click interface for individuals new to the online world to navigate. If new subscribers should falter, the service offers a Big Sisters program where members of the WIRE community show them the ropes.

In addition, unlike many of today’s popular online services that are male-dominated, individuals logged on to WIRE are identified by their full name — no nicknames or pseudonyms, which are sometimes used as a shield for bad behavior. As is true with most online services today, individual subscribers deemed disruptive to the community can be removed.

HANGING OUT ON THE WIRE

While the official rollout of WIRE is expected in January 1994, the Founding Subscribers program was launched Oct. 1, making WIRE available on a limited basis to up to 500 people who are interested in helping to build the system and to establish some of the content within the various forums. Already, the service has attracted more than 150 subscribers — 10 percent of whom are men.

A year in the making. For WIRE cofounders Ellen Pack, president, and Nancy Rhine, development director, the birth of WIRE is the culmination of more than one year’s work — developing a business plan and raising money from friends and business associates to build the service.

Neither Pack nor Rhine would be considered typical online junkies. In fact, Rhine, who has been involved in the computer industry for about 12 years, used to “resist” using the telecommunications medium. “I had my circle of people who I had face-to-face communication with, and I believed that was the only way to really communicate,” she says.

Eventually some of the founding members of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, a popular online service commonly known as the WELL, coaxed Rhine, whom they had known for more than 20 years, into combining her skills in computer technology and her studies in psychology to manage the customer support group for the Sausalito, CA-based network. Once online, she immediately began to realize the potential of the medium for communication and wanted to see it expand beyond its male-dominated user group.

It wasn’t until she met WIRE cofounder Ellen Pack last year though that the women’s network started to gel. The two met in September 1992 on the WELL after mutual friends online pointed out that they shared an interest in creating a network for women.

A place to bring your friends. For Pack, who had made the move from East to West Coast less than a year before in order to work as a COO for a small software company, the “virtual community” had become an essential link for both her professional and social life.

“Once out here [in Silicon Valley], I really began to notice how people in business existed electronically,” she says. “Then I began to notice how it affected me socially, and it struck me that none my friends were online.” Pack became determined to bring a more real-world balance of male and female into the online community.

“I think women could love this medium,” she says. “Women don’t naturally look at technology and say, ‘Yuck.’ They just say, ‘What can it do for me?’ Whereas I think men look at new technologies and say, ‘Wow, how can I use this?’ It is our goal to transform this medium into a technology for women — a technology they see a use for.”

NOT A ‘SEPARATIST THING,’ BUT FOCUSED

While WIRE is targeted toward women, it is not exclusive. Similar to the SeniorNet service, which caters to individuals over the age of 60, all who are interested in participating in WIRE are welcome. The content, however, is focused on issues that directly affect women.

For example WIRE’s Health & Fitness forum has a database that claims to contain the latest research on breast cancer. A list in the education forum contains information on scholarships granted solely to female students. Conversations on parenting drift through a number of the forums, from information on midwives under “Health” to toys and books reviewed by adults and children under “Arts and Leisure.”

Both Rhine and Pack stress that WIRE is not a “backlash reaction” to sexist behaviors practiced by some males online. “The focus of the content and the resources, biographies — everything on WIRE — are all things I am interested in as a women,” explains Pack. “Basically we see WIRE as an online, interactive women’s magazine. It doesn’t feel separatist; it just feels focused.”

A BALANCING ACT TO KEEP WIRE FLYIN’

Focus is great, but is WIRE too focused? The service needs about 10,000 subscribers for Rhine and Pack to break even. They believe they can attract that many subscribers by next fall. If they do — and the vast majority of them are women — they will be not only setting precedents in the online community, but in sociological circles as well. Although women make up more than half of the computer users in corporate America today, they have resisted participating in the growing virtual community online.

According to an interview in Working Woman with sociologist Mary Frances Stuck of the State University of New York at Oswego, this resistance is not because women have never found an electronic information service that’s just right for them, but because females fundamentally perceive technology as an office tool.

“Women tend to think of computers as productivity tools, whether it be word-processing or spreadsheets or database management, rather than something that connects you to other people,” Stuck writes. In addition, she says, women are often reluctant to waste time “playing” with the networks on the job, and at home they are probably too busy.

Try it, you’ll like it. Pack and Rhine hope to break through the existing perception barriers by raising awareness among women — in and outside of the technology industries — about the power of telecommunications. Together, they have been hosting seminars and workshops for non-profit women’s groups on what an online service is, what are the benefits of using one and how to navigate through a system.

Mentoring customers. In January, the two founders plan to select 15 of the organizations that participated in the workshops and give them free accounts to WIRE as well as to connect the selected groups with a technical advisor conversant in the WIRE network from CompuMentor, a San Francisco-based non-profit group committed to technology and education.

“I want this tool to be accessible to women as well as seniors and disabled people,” says Rhine. “I want it to be multicultural. We really see ourselves as a catalyst for connecting women around the world.” Already WIRE has received calls from individuals and groups from Canada, Mexico and Europe who want to subscribe, or who want to link WIRE to other online networks around the world.

The subscription fee is $15 per month, which includes two free hours of access each month. Additional time is $2.50 per hour. Once you have the necessary software, you can connect to WIRE by a direct phone call, or via SprintNet. (SprintNet is a packet-switching network that allows computer users in most U.S. cities to connect to WIRE by making a local phone call.) SprintNet users pay an additional hourly surcharge to offset WIRE’s cost of this service; this can bring the hourly cost up to as much as $7.50, depending on time of day.

Janice Maloney