December 16, 1990

WHILE WE lunatics are waiting for fiber-optic telecommunications to come screaming around the bend of the future, the rest of the world that has some concern about the state of its pocketbook as opposed to the state of the art is perfectly content to use the telephone technology of today.

This attitude is fortuitously prevalent in the non-profit community. CompuMentor, the San Francisco-based organization that aligns technology buffs with computer-ignorant non-profits that need their skills, has been using money from two year’s worth of grants to develop what director Daniel Ben-Horin calls a “networking curricula” to help bring “NPOs” online.

The money comes from the Telecommunications Education Trust, the $16.5 million penalty levied against the phone company by the Public Utilities Commission. The money must be spent to encourage low-income and minority ratepayers to learn about and use the phone company’s services even more. (Strange logic.)

But the humble and deserving recipients, at least in this case, are non-profit organizations, traditionally unable to pool scarce resources and information with other such groups. Those days are largely over. Ben-Horin says that non-profits are becoming increasingly hip to the power of a PC and a modem. In San Francisco alone, two big electronic networks are operating specifically to enfranchise non-profits connected with issues such as ecology, peace and social justice.

HandsNet and PeaceNet, which operate under the umbrella of the Institute for Global Communications, boast some 7,000 online users worldwide, representing several hundred organizations in 50 countries. Institute director Geoff Sears says the networks are really nothing more than “tools” for activist organizations to exchange information and organize ideas. They’re working in countries such as Malaysia, Brazil and even such alien planets as Washington D.C., on such issues as rainforest development.

Another big focus of Eco/PeaceNet is breaking down international barriers to telecom. This is not only because the cost of a long-distance telephone call to the Institute’s computers in San Francisco can be prohibitive; in places like the USSR, where payment for such services has to be made in hard currency, it can be impossible.

So Sears says the Institute has begun installing its networked minicomputers overseas. Such a project is now underway in the Soviet Union, a sprawling environmental disaster area from the polluted Aral Sea to its pesticide- and radiation-riddled agricultural land.

Another vital service provided by the Institute’s networks is news. It should be apparent by now that the news we get from other parts of the world is often heavily tainted and sometimes directed by U.S. agencies with a hand in how governments operate outside of our own spacious skies and fruited plains.

Another useful application for online technology is being aided and abetted by the Buck Trust, otherwise known as the Marin Community Foundation. With $18 million a year to spend in Marin County, many projects under consideration, according to director and six-year online veteran Mike Howe, include online databases.

Marin county libraries, for example, are creating a database of all the holdings of county and city libraries so that anybody could log on, look up the book they want to check out and order it, using their computer and modem.

Another smashingly successful network of non-profits was born of the Hands Across America project which drew national attention to hunger and homelessness in the U.S. Fittingly called HandsNet, the Santa Cruz-based operation boasts some 1,200 organizations online in 50 states. The Rural Telecommunications Initiative, for example, is getting the “poorest of the poor” type of non-profit online via HandsNet, with the help of various service organizations and 82 computers donated by Apple.

Now, this stuff isn’t high-end anything — cheap computers, cheap modems, and regular old phone lines — but they’re delivering exponential increases in personal and organizational power, connecting us to ourselves and to the rest of the world.