Jim Callahan

Name: Jim Callahan

E-mail: JCalhan@Sundial.net

Organization: Well-Connected Community of Central FL,Inc

City and State: Orlando, FL

Area of Employment: business

How I heard about Network Democracy:

A link to the Universal Service/Network Democracy seminar web site was posted to the CIVTALK listserv. CIVTALK is a mailing list of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) Civic Networking Grant program. As a board member of the Well-Connected Community of Central FL: http://www.well-cc.org I was involved in applying for a CPB Civic Networking grant.

My experience in this area:

I became involved in the Well-Connected Community through CountyWatch, a local bi-partisan citizen's organization which advocated improved citizen access to government through electronic democracy in report titled, "Gateway 94." My day job as an economic forecaster for a local municipal electric company exposes to a business / economic perspective. I have used personal computers at home, at work and in partisan politics since the early 1980s. More recently, when it was time for the Orange County Library System to renew its mainframe computer maintenance contract, I was able to influence them to move in the direction of a public access computer network using intranet and internet technologies.

What I hope to learn:

The first priority of the Well-Connected Community of Central Fl has been to establish a web-site with links to local sources. I was opposed to literally following the "FreeNet" model, because the growth of the Web and local internet service providers had made the original freenet model obsolete. We still need equal access and my current analysis is that we could revive the essence of freenet type access through a form of "rationing" (ie. 20 minutes of access at time), but how would we pay for the system administration costs in a county of 750,000 people that will grow to a million by 2010?

Additional comments:

[No information provided.]