to pursue common ends. The phrase “digital city” was used to indicate the movement of city-level and community-level activities of civic life into the digital domain.
Van den Besselaar and Beckers (2005) trace the origin of the term “digital city” to the founding in 1993 of De Digitale Stad (DDS) in Amsterdam, widely considered to be the first attempt at creating a connected urban network with civic goals beyond simply experimenting with emerging technologies. DDS arose in an environment that had already appropriated the new technology of cable television for community access purposes. An amalgam of hackers and community activists embarked on the DDS project with the goal of offering universal internet access and developing applications that citizens could use to accomplish civic ends. According to van den Besselaar and Beckers (2005):
“The organizers wanted to introduce the Internet and its possibilities to a wider population by providing free access to the Internet, creating an electronic public domain for social and political debate and enabling free expression and social experimentation in cyberspace” (p. 68).
One of the first accomplishments of DDS was to link politicians with citizens and to set up political discussion forums to support elections taking place in 1994. As far as I know, this is the first use of a digital network environment to support an election. Although it grew quickly at first, DDS had a difficult time transitioning through various phases of technological change, particularly the introduction of the World Wide Web, and the ultimate commercialization of the internet. The rise of commercial providers of competing services such as email and search tools eroded the large user base who focused primarily on these particular services.
A significant feature of DDS was its use of an urban metaphor to organize its services and features. DDS contained a “library,” “post office,” “city hall,” “arts and culture center,” “election center,” special interest “cafes,” and other virtual places. This metaphor was maintained when DDS switched from a text-based interface to a graphical interface, and the latter allowed designers to present the “digital city” spatially as a city map and to support “strolling” as a navigational metaphor. Users were encouraged to have a “house” in a virtual neighborhood, which was an early version of representing the self in cyberspace. While this drew considerable attention from researchers as an innovative and interesting experiment in virtual public space, it may have proved limiting both technically (there were limits on the number of houses and sizes of neighborhoods, for example) and in terms of the constraints of the metaphor with regard to imaginative new applications. An attempt to deploy a 3D interface to DDS and integrate it with live television was probably ahead of its time in the 1990s and resulted in a reduction in users who had the bandwidth and computing power to use DDS. By 2001, DDS had disappeared (see Van den Besselaar and Beckers, 2005 for an extensive history).
Several community network efforts with similarities to DDS appeared around the U.S. at about the same time (Schuler, 1994). Examples include Big Sky Telegraph, Berkeley Community Memory (Farrington and Pine, 1996), Santa Monica Public Electronic Network (Rogers, Collins-Jarvis, and Schmitz, 1994), Seattle Community Network (SCN), and Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV). According to Yasuoka, Ishida, and Aurigig (2010), the earliest digital city was the Cleveland Free-Net, founded in 1986 as a research project within Case Western Reserve University.
The Cleveland Free-Net (CFN) was a local network initially not connected to the then-nascent internet. It provided email and online bulletin board services to its users, who numbered almost 160,000 by the time of its discontinuation in 1995. The evolution of the CFN was largely an experiment in technical capability, however it was also an early example of an information network in which the users played a significant role in producing its content. The founder of CFN, who also envisioned a “National Public Telecomputing Network” (NPTN) in advance of the fully realized internet, described several requirements for public networks (Schuler, 1994). They should be:
• community-based, such that everyone has a stake in the content;
• reciprocal, where users are both information consumers and producers;
• contribution-based, in which the content of forums is generated by users;
• unrestricted, allowing anyone to contribute anything (with limitations on harassing, criminal, or libelous content);
• accessible and inexpensive, to maximize equitable use; and
• modifiable, whereby the system and services themselves can be changed in a participatory manner by users.
As we will see, these requirements for community networks have interesting resonance with the requirements that political theorists place on open deliberative spaces. The founders of CFN encouraged developers of other “Free Nets” to measure desirable outcomes such as increased community cohesion; better-informed citizens; greater use of educational and training resources over the lifespan; and an “inclusive, ethical, and enlightened democracy.”
The SCN is notable because, like DDS, many local activist groups were involved in its funding. Initially, an environmental group called Sustainable Seattle established a home page on the site, followed closely by a homeless women’s network called the Homeless Network, and a feminist organization called BaseCamp Seattle. BaseCamp Seattle held early meetings combining technology education and awareness with political workshops (Silver, 2004). Growth of SCN was fast for the time, starting with 700 users in 1994 and growing to 13,000 in 1997 (Schuler, 1996).
The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), launched in 1993, stands in stark contrast to many of the “free net” projects because of the extensive attention paid to it by behavioral and social scientists (Carroll, 2005). Like CFN, BEV was also a collaboration between a university, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), and its surrounding community. The promise of BEV, and community networks in general, is reflected in this quote from an early research project:
“[C]ommunity networks are a potentially radical medium within which to manage community history: they augment the real, physical communities in which we live our fragmented lives by supporting distributed, asynchronous, personal interactions: we can get to the campfire or General Store anytime and anywhere” (Carroll et al., 1995, p. 6).
Surveys taken during the early days of BEV showed that people’s primary interests in the network were “learning and teaching, civic interests, social relations, support for work or business, consumer information, entertainment, and medical services” (Carroll and Rosson, 1996). When it was founded, BEV maintained a discussion forum for policies related to use of the network, however this forum quickly became a hub for discussion of civic issues such as downtown parking policies and for community issues such as restaurant reviews and birth announcements (Carroll and Rosson, 1996).
BEV initially had two primary goals, to connect citizens with government electronically and to help businesses create and utilize a digital presence (Carroll, 2005). The goal of connecting citizens with each other was not prominent at the outset, but as various local organizations began to develop presences on BEV, many community-building activities began to evolve. Carroll (2005) describes how senior groups, churches, and other organizations successfully occupied BEV and created social communities that might otherwise have not formed.
Early on BEV became a participatory project in which members built their own content. Eventually, as other user-driven content sites became prominent, BEV evolved into an organizational portal. Still, this DIY feature is often referenced as a reason for the long-term success of BEV (Carroll, 2005; Carroll and Rosson, 1996).
BEV successfully navigated the transition from a text-based network to a predominantly graphical network on the World Wide Web. While BEV itself never utilized a strict place-based metaphor such as DDS, a companion project called MOOsburg did graft a geographical coordinate system with
