Madeline Gonzalez Allen

F or several decades,Cuban-born Madeline Gonzalez Allen has been exploring how technology could enhance our ability to share knowledge and facilitate collaboration within communities, organizations, and corporations, in balance with sustaining a practice of conscious Presence, mindfulness, Beingness. .

Community Networking, an Evolution

Abstract:

Over the years, “community networking” has evolved and contributed toward what has become known as “social media,” with many exciting and novel ways we can all be interconnected. The author relates how she followed a vision for community networking and how, as the Internet was becoming a public medium, she felt a calling to do all that she could so that everyone – regardless of their educational background, income level, employment status, ethnicity, gender or any other “classification” – could have the same opportunity to learn about and shape and benefit from this emerging technology. The paper details how she worked with people from communities across Colorado (e.g., Telluride, Boulder, Southern Ute Tribe) to develop innovative community applications of the then-nascent Internet technology, how participants shared what they learned with people from other communities, and how she eventually co-led the creation of an international Association for Community Networking.

"While backpacking through the San Juan Mountains, I came to a high-alpine jewel of a town surrounded by majestic peaks -- Telluride. I met Richard Lowenberg, and others from the Telluride Institute, and shared with them ideas about the Internet. I wondered: could this emerging Internet technology be applied in ways that could be of real benefit to communities? This would become the central driving question at the heart of my vision for community networking. I stayed in Telluride. Back then, the Internet was virtually unheard of, and few people outside of certain research settings/some large corporations had ever “sent an e-mail message.” I shared my personal experiences, the ways we had used the technology at AT&T Bell Labs, some of the ways it could potentially be used by people in communities to transcend geographical limitations. As a core member of the team, I helped to create the Telluride InfoZone, one of the first rural community Internet-based information systems in the world. The “InfoZone” system itself was a kind of electronic “bulletin board,” providing community information, and serving as a type of community repository. For me, it was the education and collaboration that happened around the creating of the system, rather than necessarily just “the system” itself, that seemed to be of the greatest value."

Source:

The complete paper is Madeline Gonzalez Allen, "Community Networking, an Evolution", in Judy Malloy, ed., Social Media Archeology and Poetics, MIT Press, 2016. pp. 291-296